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Azalia Mirhoseini

Azalia Mirhoseini is an AI researcher, co-founder of Ricursive Intelligence, and assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University.

Contents17 sections
Key facts

Early Life and Education

Mirhoseini was born in Iran.⁠[1]

She earned a BSc in electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology and a PhD in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University.⁠[2]

Industry Research

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Networks

In 2017, she co-authored the sparsely gated mixture-of-experts layer. A gating network selects a small set of experts for each input, allowing model capacity to grow without a proportional rise in computation.⁠[3]

The team tested expert layers with up to 137 billion parameters in language modeling and machine translation.⁠[3]

Innovators Under 35

In 2019, MIT Technology Review named her an Innovator Under 35, highlighting her research on reinforcement learning for chip layouts.⁠[1]

Chip Layouts and AlphaChip

The team introduced its reinforcement-learning chip-layout method in 2020, with the related Nature article appearing in June 2021. A September 2024 addendum named it AlphaChip; Mirhoseini and Anna GoldieAnna GoldieAnna Goldie is an AI researcher and co-founder and CEO of Ricursive Intelligence. She previously worked at Anthropic and Google DeepMind and co-led AlphaChip.Open the full entry were equal first authors of the addendum.⁠[4]

In a subsequent response, the authors reported deployment in three TPU generations and emphasized learning from existing chip blocks before transferring to new layouts.⁠[5]

Constitutional AI

She co-authored Constitutional AI, which uses human-chosen principles for self-critique and revision, followed by training with AI preference feedback.⁠[6]

Stanford Teaching and Research

She created and taught CS229S, Systems for Machine Learning, with autumn offerings in 2023 and 2024. The course addresses efficiency and scalability in training, fine-tuning, and inference.⁠[7]

Her Scaling Intelligence Lab studies scalable intelligence, self-improvement, verification, and the mutual optimization of AI and computing systems.⁠[8]

In autumn 2025, she co-taught CS329A, Self-Improving AI Agents, with Aakanksha Chowdhery, covering tool use, memory, reasoning, planning, and evaluation.⁠[9]

The Okawa Foundation listed her as a 2025 overseas research-grant recipient for “Towards Self-Improving AI Systems.”⁠[10]

Evaluating Chip-Layout Methods

In 2023, Nature investigated performance claims in the study. The withdrawn item was a separate News & Views commentary, not the research paper.⁠[11]

The authors’ 2024 response reported that Nature had closed its investigation after review. They also argued that the critical evaluation used different pretraining, compute, and convergence conditions.⁠[5]

Cheng and colleagues’ updated 2026 assessment used new public 7-nanometer benchmarks and updated Circuit Training, identifying scalability and pretraining methodology as questions still needing confirmation.⁠[12]

Scaling Inference Compute

In Large Language Monkeys, she studied repeated sampling: more attempts can increase the fraction of problems with at least one correct answer. DeepSeek-V2-Coder-Instruct coverage on SWE-bench Lite rose from 15.9% with one sample to 56% with 250.⁠[13]

Without an automatic verifier, selecting the correct answer remains a limitation; coverage is not final selection accuracy.⁠[13]

KernelBench

She co-authored KernelBench, which evaluates language-model GPU kernels on 250 PyTorch workloads. Its fast_p metric requires both functional correctness and a specified speedup.⁠[14]

The study found that execution and profiling feedback improved iterative results, while models still struggled to generate efficient kernels directly.⁠[14]

Perspectives on Inference Scaling

At Simons Institute, she discussed parallel sampling, serial revision, and inference-step combinations, stressing limits from verification quality and computational cost.⁠[15]

She described continual learning as a research direction, without establishing unlimited improvement: fine-tuning could reduce answer diversity, and experiments needed more compute.⁠[15]

Founding Ricursive Intelligence

In 2025, she and Anna Goldie founded Ricursive Intelligence.⁠[16]

In January 2026, Lightspeed announced that it was leading the Series A, emphasizing co-development of AI models and specialized chips.⁠[17]

As of October 2026, the company website lists $335 million in backing, with investors including Sequoia.⁠[18]

Measuring Local AI Efficiency

Her co-authored Intelligence per Watt was submitted in 2025 and updated in 2026. It combines accuracy and power consumption, testing over 20 local models, eight accelerators, and around one million single-turn queries.⁠[19]

The latest version reports accurate local responses to 88.7% of tested queries, varying by domain and not generalizable to every task.⁠[19]

OpenJarvis

She contributed to OpenJarvis, a local-first personal AI framework organized around models, inference engines, agents, tools and memory, and learning, with energy, latency, and cost included in evaluation.⁠[20]

The project studies improvement from local execution traces and permits cloud calls when necessary; local-first does not mean every configuration is entirely offline.⁠[20]

A General-Purpose Verification Framework

The LLM-as-a-Verifier project, announced in April 2026, lists Mirhoseini as an equal adviser. It improves assessment of agent trajectories through scoring granularity, repeated verification, and decomposition of evaluation criteria.⁠[21]

Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts

Azalia Mirhoseini Personal Website: Official website: https://www.azaliamirhoseini.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]

Stanford University: Official website: https://www.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[23]

Rice University: Official website: https://www.rice.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[24]

Ricursive Intelligence: Official website: https://www.ricursive.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]

Scaling Intelligence Lab: Official website: https://scalingintelligence.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]

Google DeepMind: Official website: https://deepmind.google/ (opens in a new window)⁠[25]

X Public Account: Official account: https://x.com/Azaliamirh (opens in a new window)⁠[26]

Sources

  1. Azalia Mirhoseini (opens in a new window)
  2. Azalia Mirhosseini (opens in a new window)
  3. Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer (opens in a new window)
  4. Addendum: A graph placement methodology for fast chip design (opens in a new window)
  5. That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design (opens in a new window)
  6. Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback (opens in a new window)
  7. CS 229S — Systems for Machine Learning (opens in a new window)
  8. Scaling Intelligence Lab (opens in a new window)
  9. CS329A Self-Improving AI Agents (opens in a new window)
  10. The Recipients of the Research Grant (Overseas) (opens in a new window)
  11. Nature flags doubts over Google AI study, pulls commentary (opens in a new window)
  12. An Updated Assessment of Reinforcement Learning for Macro Placement (opens in a new window)
  13. Large Language Monkeys: Scaling Inference Compute with Repeated Sampling (opens in a new window)
  14. KernelBench: Can LLMs Write Efficient GPU Kernels? (opens in a new window)
  15. Inference Scaling: A New Frontier for AI Capability (opens in a new window)
  16. Ricursive Intelligence:企业及投资资料 (opens in a new window)
  17. Investing in Ricursive Intelligence: AI for Chip Design and Chip Design for AI (opens in a new window)
  18. Ricursive Intelligence (opens in a new window)
  19. Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI (opens in a new window)
  20. OpenJarvis: Personal AI, On Personal Devices (opens in a new window)
  21. LLM-as-a-Verifier: A General-Purpose Verification Framework (opens in a new window)
  22. Azalia Mirhoseini (opens in a new window)
  23. Stanford University (opens in a new window)
  24. Rice University (opens in a new window)
  25. Google DeepMind (opens in a new window)
  26. Azalia Mirhoseini (@Azaliamirh) (opens in a new window)
  27. Azalia Mirhoseini (opens in a new window)