Asher Spector

Competing for HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, he won the North American championship and reached the Yale IV semifinals in 2019.⁠[1]

He graduated from Harvard University in 2021.⁠[2]

In 2021, he reached the HWS Round Robin final and APDA Nationals semifinals.⁠[1]

His paper with Lucas Janson appeared in The Annals of Statistics, volume 50, issue 1. It proposed improving knockoff variable-selection power by minimizing reconstructability, with a knockpy implementation.⁠[3]

Stanford’s statistics department named Asher Spector among its Departmental Teaching Assistant Award recipients.⁠[4]

He and his collaborators submitted a preprint proposing a nonparametric permutation test for factor-model goodness of fit, illustrated with a BlackRockBlackRockBlackRock is a publicly traded investment management company headquartered in New York, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven others and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker BLK); its businesses include the iShares family of exchange-traded funds and the Aladdin investment and risk management platform. As of June 30, 2026, its assets under management totaled $15.3 trillion.Open the full entry risk model.⁠[5]

With Rina Foygel Barber and Emmanuel Candès, he submitted Mosaic inference on panel data, a preprint studying tests of cluster independence and linear-model confidence intervals under local exchangeability.⁠[6]

Stanford’s statistics department announced that he and Will Hartog received the Centennial Teaching Assistant Award for graduate teaching contributions.⁠[7]

A Harvard statistics department notice that day reported that Flapping Airplanes, the lab he helped found, had raised $180 million in seed funding at a $1.5 billion valuation.⁠[8]

Index Ventures lists him, Ben Spector, and Aidan SmithAidan SmithAidan Smith is an engineer and co-founder of Flapping Airplanes who previously worked at Neuralink. He was selected for the 2025 Thiel Fellowship.Open the full entry as founders of the lab, whose research focuses on AI data efficiency.⁠[9]

Ben Spector’s personal website identifies Asher as his brother and says they run the lab with Aidan Smith.⁠[10]

In the interview published that day, he said there was no timetable for completing research or commercialization; research would come first.⁠[11]

He suggested that greater data efficiency might improve reasoning, reduce the cost of learning new tasks, and expand AI in data-limited fields such as robotics and scientific discovery. These were research hypotheses.⁠[11]

In the talk published by Sequoia Capital, he argued that high-quality data is harder to scale than compute and that data efficiency could broaden AI competition. He also outlined an approach combining GPU systems and algorithm research.⁠[12]

Stanford’s statistics department lists his graduation year as 2026 and his dissertation as Topics in Assumption-lean Statistical Inference. His adviser was Emmanuel Candès.⁠[13]

He worked with industry researchers at Cursor, Mercor, BlackRock, and Novartis AG, and previously interned at Meta and Bridgewater.⁠[2]

His personal website lists research support from the NSF and Citadel GQS.⁠[2]

Stanford Debate Society lists him as a parliamentary debate coach.⁠[1]

His GitHub account publishes statistical computing projects including knockpy, mosaicperm, pyblip, and dualbounds.⁠[14]

As of October 18, 2026, the lab’s website described it as operating in stealth, focused on fundamental data-efficiency research, and not currently prioritizing commercialization.⁠[15]

Flapping Airplanes: Official website: https://flappingairplanes.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

Harvard University Department of Statistics: Official website: https://statistics.fas.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]

Stanford University Department of Statistics: Official website: https://statistics.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

Stanford Debate Society: Official website: https://debate.groups.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Cursor: Official website: https://cursor.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Mercor: Official website: https://www.mercor.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

BlackRock: Official website: https://www.blackrock.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Novartis AG: Official website: https://www.novartis.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Meta: Official website: https://www.meta.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Bridgewater: Official website: https://www.bridgewater.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Personal website: Official website: https://amspector100.github.io/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Public X account: Official account: https://x.com/amspector100 (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

Public LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry account: Official account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asher-spector-7981a1155 (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

Public GitHub account: Official account: https://github.com/amspector100 (opens in a new window)⁠[14]

Golden Ratio Investments (linked from personal website): Official website: https://golden-rat.io/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]