mit-csail
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Andi Peng and the art of asking what people want
From a Yale classroom and the White House to robot learning and a frontier AI startup, Peng has kept returning to one difficult question: what does the person on the other side of the machine actually want?
Ethan Hu Is Teaching Machines to Build the Third Dimension
The Meshy founder spent years teaching computers to simulate snow, smoke and soft bodies. After two failed pivots, he found a larger question: what if making a 3D object became as ordinary as typing a sentence?
Ray Liao Is Giving AI Agents an Address of Their Own
After a decade in Boston, the MIT-trained founder ran one last route through the city and headed west. His new company, Inkbox, is betting that useful AI agents need more than intelligence - they need a persistent way to show up.
Ramin Hasani
Ramin Hasani is the co-founder and CEO of Liquid AI, the MIT CSAIL spin-off building Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) - a family of general-purpose AI systems descended from his work on liquid neural networks. Inspired by the 302-neuron nervous system of the C. elegans worm, his continuous-time architectures adapt after training and run efficiently on edge hardware. Liquid AI raised a $250M Series A led by AMD in December 2024 at a $2.35B valuation.
Gleb Chuvpilo
Gleb Chuvpilo is an American serial entrepreneur, engineer, and venture investor who is co-founder and CEO of Thor Dynamics, the maker of Laser Armor, an AI-driven directed-energy system built to detect, track, and burn drone swarms out of the sky within seconds from a kilometer away. A graduate of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Wharton School, he was an early Palantir engineer, traded quant strategies at Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, invested alongside Peter Thiel at Thiel Macro, and co-founded startups including Authy (Y Combinator 2012, acquired by Twilio), Ride, and Pager. He also runs deep-tech VC firm Thundermark Capital and is known in AI circles for his annual AI Research Rankings analyzing publication output at NeurIPS and ICML.
Tao Chen
Tao Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Dexmate, a Santa Clara robotics startup building general-purpose mobile humanoid robots with genuinely dexterous hands. An MIT CSAIL PhD whose research on in-hand object reorientation won the CoRL 2021 Best Paper Award and landed in Science Robotics, Chen left academia to chase a single conviction: that robots will only matter when their hands can do the small, fiddly, human things. Dexmate's first product, Vega, a folding dual-armed robot built in under six months, is his bet that the moment has finally arrived.
Dynamo AI
Dynamo AI is a San Francisco-based enterprise AI security and governance company that helps regulated organizations deploy generative and agentic AI safely. Born out of MIT CSAIL research, its platform - spanning DynamoEval, DynamoGuard, and AgentWarden - tests AI systems for vulnerabilities, applies real-time, customizable guardrails against threats like prompt injection, data leakage, and hallucinations, and produces the compliance documentation enterprises need to meet regulations such as the EU AI Act.
Tutor Intelligence
Tutor Intelligence builds AI-powered collaborative robots that pick, pack, and palletize alongside people on factory and warehouse floors. Born out of MIT's CSAIL, the company sells robots by the hour - a Robots-as-a-Service model that drops a working robot onto a line in days, not months, with no programming required. Its flagship Cassie handles infinite SKUs at up to 14 cases per minute, while Data Factory 1, a 100-robot facility in a renovated Watertown mill, trains the next generation of factory-ready robot AI on real-world data.