Chelsea Finn

She has said she loved puzzles as a child and that both of her parents were engineers.⁠[1]

She did some robotics and computer science in middle school but did not see it as a career until college, and explored computational biology before turning to robotics and computer vision; such interest, she said, “kind of happens over time.”⁠[2]

From 2010 to 2014 she studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Bachelor of Science degree.⁠[3]

She pursued a PhD in computer science at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, advised by Sergey LevineSergey LevineSergey Levine is a computer scientist and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley who works on deep reinforcement learning and robot learning, co-developed algorithms such as Soft Actor-Critic and Conservative Q-Learning, and in 2024 co-founded the robot foundation model company Physical Intelligence.Open the full entry and Pieter AbbeelPieter AbbeelPieter Abbeel is an artificial intelligence and robotics researcher from Belgium, a professor at UC Berkeley and director of its Robot Learning Lab, known for research on robot apprenticeship learning and deep reinforcement learning. He co-founded Gradescope and Covariant and joined Amazon with part of the Covariant team in 2024.Open the full entry; during that time she worked at Google BrainGoogle BrainGoogle Brain was Google’s AI research team, co-founded by Jeff Dean and others in 2011. It open-sourced the TensorFlow machine learning system in 2015 and was merged with DeepMind into Google DeepMind in April 2023.Open the full entry with Ian GoodfellowIan GoodfellowIan Goodfellow is a machine learning researcher who introduced generative adversarial networks (GANs) in 2014 while a doctoral student at the University of Montreal and co-wrote the textbook Deep Learning with Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville; he worked at Google Brain, OpenAI and Apple before joining DeepMind in 2022.Open the full entry and Sergey Levine, and she was named a Facebook Fellow in 2018.⁠[4]

At the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR) she worked on deep reinforcement learning, having robots learn to manipulate, rearrange and grasp objects through trial and error rather than explicit programming, such as mastering a wooden shape-sorting toy.⁠[5]

Her dissertation, “Learning to Learn with Gradients,” introduced methods including model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) that let deep networks learn new tasks from small datasets, and won the 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. At the time she was a research scientist at Google Brain and a postdoctoral researcher at the Berkeley AI Research Lab.⁠[6]

In June 2018, at 25, she was named to MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 list; her robots could learn to manipulate an object after seeing a single video of a person doing it. She said, “In many ways, the capabilities of robotic systems are still in their infancy,” adding, “The goal is to have them gain common sense.”⁠[7]

From 2019 she has been an assistant professor in Stanford University’s computer science and electrical engineering departments.⁠[3]

At Stanford she leads the IRIS lab, which “studies intelligence through robotic interaction at scale.”⁠[8]

She holds the William George and Ida Mary Hoover Faculty Fellowship and is a faculty affiliate of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and of the Symbolic Systems Program.⁠[9]

She received a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship (2020), an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2021), the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award (2022) and a Sloan Research Fellowship (2023).⁠[9]

She paired undergraduates with AI graduate students and helped with AI4ALL, a nonprofit promoting diversity in AI. On underrepresentation she said, “I worry about people feeling like they don’t fit in.”⁠[1]

In June 2023 she received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the agency’s award for early-career faculty, for the project “Robust and Autonomous Robot Adaptation in Novel Scenarios.”⁠[10]

That year she was named a 2023 AI2050 Early Career Fellow by Schmidt Sciences under the “Assurance” hard problem, with a project aiming to make models more robust using small amounts of targeted corrections to their underlying misconceptions.⁠[11]

In 2024 she co-founded the robotics AI company Physical Intelligence with Karol Hausman (chief executive), Sergey Levine and others, announcing the venture on X. The company raised $70 million from investors including OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry and Lux CapitalLux CapitalLux Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Josh Wolfe and Robert Paull, with offices in New York and Silicon Valley. Focused on emerging science and technology, the firm backs companies in fields including life sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, manufacturing, aerospace and defense through fund investments and by helping to found companies.Open the full entry; as of April 2024 it had a team of ten.⁠[12]

She co-authored π0, Physical Intelligence’s first generalist robot policy, released in October 2024.⁠[13]

In November 2024 Physical Intelligence raised $400 million from investors including Jeff BezosJeff BezosJeff Bezos is an American entrepreneur and investor who founded Amazon in 1994, led it as chief executive for many years, and became its executive chair in 2021. He also founded the spaceflight company Blue Origin, bought The Washington Post in 2013, and set up philanthropic funds including the Bezos Earth Fund.Open the full entry, OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, at a valuation of about $2 billion per PitchBook data; this was company-level funding.⁠[14]

In January 2025 she was selected, along with Stanford colleagues Dorsa Sadigh and Mary Wootters, for the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), described as the highest honor the U.S. government bestows on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers.⁠[15]

In November 2025 Physical Intelligence raised $600 million at a $5.6 billion valuation in a round led by CapitalG, with Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, Jeff Bezos, Index Ventures and T. Rowe Price participating; the figures were not officially disclosed by the company.⁠[16]

In April 2026 she was among the authors of π0.7, a Physical Intelligence robotic foundation model that the company said matched fine-tuned specialists on dexterous tasks.⁠[17]

In August 2026 she was named to TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI; her work has been cited more than 140,000 times. Her goal is a model that can do “any task in any environment on any robot,” and she said reaching a 99 percent success rate is “not a solved problem.”⁠[18]

In late October 2026 Physical Intelligence was said to be in talks to raise at least $1 billion at a valuation of about $20 billion, led by existing backers Avenir and Lux Capital, with its previous round said to have valued it at $11.5 billion and the company said to have no revenue yet; the company did not confirm the talks.⁠[19]

She is an Associate Fellow in CIFAR’s Learning in Machines & Brains program.⁠[20]