reasoning-models
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Kanjun Qiu
Kanjun Qiu is the co-founder and CEO of Imbue, a San Francisco AI research lab building agents that reason and code while keeping humans at the helm. A CS grad from MIT who once funded her studies writing high-frequency trading algorithms, she was Dropbox's first chief of staff, co-founded the ML recruiting startup Sourceress, and now runs a lab that raised over $200M (Series B, backers including Nvidia) at a valuation north of $1 billion. She's also a general partner at Outset Capital, a Sequoia Scout, and co-author of Sew Electric, a book that teaches kids computer science through sewing.
Drishan Arora
Drishan Arora is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Cogito, a San Francisco AI lab building toward general superintelligence through openly released reasoning models. A former senior engineer at Google who led large language model work for its generative search, Arora left to chase a contrarian bet: that intelligence improves not by searching harder but by building better intuition. His team trained the Cogito family of hybrid reasoning models - which can answer instantly or stop to think - in roughly 75 days, then scaled to a 671-billion-parameter model his company calls the strongest open-weight LLM from a US firm. The method underneath it all, iterated distillation and amplification, lets the models internalize their own reasoning paths and self-improve.