The Challenge

We are seeking researchers who:

• See "unsolved" problems as opportunities to pioneer entirely new approaches
• Can identify the one critical experiment that will validate or kill an idea in days, not months
• Have the vision to scale successful proofs-of-concept 100x
• Are obsessed with using AI to automate and amplify your own impact

If you find yourself energized rather than daunted by these expectations—if you're already thinking about five ideas to try while reading this—you might be the researcher we need. This role demands obsession with the problems, creativity in approach, and relentless drive toward elegant, scalable solutions. The technical challenges are immense, but the potential impact is transformative.

It's Important to Us That You Have

• Strong mathematical foundation in statistical learning theory, particularly in areas relevant to self-supervised and multimodal learning
• Deep expertise in foundation model architectures, with an understanding of how to scale training across multiple modalities
• Proven ability to bridge theory and practice—someone who can both derive novel mathematical formulations and implement them efficiently
• Demonstrated ability to build data pipelines that can process and curate massive datasets while maintaining quality and diversity
• Track record of designing controlled experiments that isolate the impact of architectural innovations and validate theoretical insights
• Experience optimizing models for real-world deployment, including knowledge of hardware constraints and efficiency techniques
• History of open-source contributions or research publications that have advanced the state of the art in speech/language AI

Ideal Researcher Profile

An ideal researcher, as evidenced by the recurring themes across these foundational papers, excels in five key areas: (1) Statistical & Mathematical Foundations, (2) Algorithmic Innovation & Implementation, (3) Data-Driven & Scalable Systems, (4) Hardware & Systems Understanding, and (5) Rigorous Experimental Design. Below is a synthesis of how each paper highlights these qualities, with references illustrating why they matter for building robust, impactful deep learning models.

1. Statistical & Mathematical Foundations

• Mastery of Core Concepts: Many papers, like Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models and Neural Discrete Representation Learning (VQ-VAE), reflect the importance of power-law analyses, derivation of novel losses, or adaptation of fundamental equations (e.g., in VQ-VAE's commitment loss or rectified flows in Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers). Such mathematical grounding clarifies why models converge or suffer collapse.
• Combining Existing Theories in Novel Ways: Papers such as Moshi (combining text modeling, audio codecs, and hierarchical generative modeling) and Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ's adaptation of classic scalar quantization to replace vector-quantized representations) show how reusing but reimagining known techniques can yield breakthroughs. Many references (e.g., the structured state-space duality in Transformers are SSMs) underscore how unifying previously separate research lines can reveal powerful algorithmic or theoretical insights.
• Logical Reasoning and Assumption Testing: Across all papers—particularly in the problem statements of Whisper or Rectified Flow Transformers—the authors present assumptions (e.g., "scaling data leads to zero-shot robustness" or "straight-line noise injection improves sample efficiency") and systematically verify them with thorough empirical results. An ideal researcher similarly grounds new ideas in well-formed, testable hypotheses.

2. Algorithmic Innovation & Implementation

• Creative Solutions to Known Bottlenecks: Each paper puts forth a unique algorithmic contribution—Rectified Flow Transformers redefines standard diffusion paths, FSQ proposes simpler scalar quantizations contrasted with VQ, phi-3 mini relies on curated data and blocksparse attention, and Mamba-2 merges SSM speed with attention concepts.
• Turning Theory into Practice: Whether it's the direct preference optimization (DPO) for alignment in phi-3 or the residual vector quantization in SoundStream, these works show that bridging design insights with implementable prototypes is essential.
• Clear Impact Through Prototypes & Open-Source: Many references (Whisper, neural discrete representation learning, Mamba-2) highlight releasing code or pretrained models, enabling the broader community to replicate and build upon new methods. This premise of collaboration fosters faster progress.

3. Data-Driven & Scalable Systems

• Emphasis on Large-Scale Data and Efficient Pipelines: Papers such as Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision (Whisper) and BASE TTS demonstrate that collecting and processing hundreds of thousands of hours of real-world audio can unlock new capabilities in zero-shot or low-resource domains. Meanwhile, phi-3 Technical Report shows that filtering and curating data at scale (e.g., "data optimal regime") can yield high performance even in smaller models.
• Strategic Use of Data for Staged Training: A recurring strategy is to vary sources of data or the order of tasks. Whisper trains on multilingual tasks, BASE TTS uses subsets/stages for pretraining on speech tokens, and phi-3 deploys multiple training phases (web data, then synthetic data). This systematic approach to data underscores how an ideal researcher designs training curricula and data filtering protocols for maximum performance.

4. Hardware & Systems Understanding

• Efficient Implementations at Scale: Many works illustrate how researchers tune architectures for modern accelerators: the In-Datacenter TPU paper exemplifies domain-specific hardware design for dense matrix multiplications, while phi-3 leverages blocksparse attention and custom Triton kernels to run advanced LLMs on resource-limited devices.
• Real-Time & On-Device Constraints: SoundStream shows how to compress audio in real time on a smartphone CPU,