# Zihang Dai

> Zihang Dai is an AI researcher and former xAI co-founder whose work on Transformer-XL and XLNet helped advance long-context language modeling and language pretraining. He earned a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon, worked at Google Brain, joined xAI's original team in 2023, and left the company in March 2026.

- **Role:** AI researcher
- **Organizations:** xAI (former co-founder), Google Brain (former research scientist), Carnegie Mellon University (alumnus)
- **Education:** Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies, Carnegie Mellon University, Language Technologies Institute
- **Known for:** Lead and equal contributor on Transformer-XL, which introduced segment-level recurrence for longer-context language modeling., Equal contributor on XLNet, whose released model outperformed BERT on 20 reported tasks at its June 2019 launch., Co-authored Funnel-Transformer, Meta Pseudo Labels, and later work on efficient transformer models.

## Career timeline

- **2016** — Co-authored research on question answering over large knowledge bases.
- **2018-2019** — Co-developed Transformer-XL with Zhilin Yang and collaborators; the paper appeared in 2019.
- **2019** — Equal contributor to XLNet, a language-pretraining method built on ideas from Transformer-XL.
- **2020** — Completed a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute and began research work at Google.
- **2020** — Co-authored Funnel-Transformer, on reducing redundant computation in language processing.
- **2023** — Named to xAI's original founding team when it was announced in July.
- **2026-03** — Left xAI, according to contemporary reporting by TechCrunch and Reuters.

## Achievements

- Lead and equal contributor on Transformer-XL, which introduced segment-level recurrence for longer-context language modeling.
- Equal contributor on XLNet, whose released model outperformed BERT on 20 reported tasks at its June 2019 launch.
- Co-authored Funnel-Transformer, Meta Pseudo Labels, and later work on efficient transformer models.
- Earned a 2020 Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University.
- Joined xAI's original founding team in 2023.

## Latest updates

- **2026-03** — Left xAI amid departures from its founding team, according to TechCrunch and Reuters reporting.

## Links

- Website: https://zihangdai.github.io/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zihang-dai-ab048336
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/ZihangDai
- GitHub: https://github.com/zihangdai

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/zihang-dai
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29