Tim Shi

According to his personal website, he studied computer science at Tsinghua University and then pursued a PhD at the Stanford AI Lab, and worked at OpenAI in its early days, collaborating with Andrej KarpathyAndrej KarpathyAndrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and educator, one of the founding members of OpenAI, who served as Tesla’s Director of AI and led the Autopilot computer vision team from 2017 to 2022, founded the AI education company Eureka Labs in 2024, and joined Anthropic in 2026 to work on pre-training research; at Stanford he designed and taught the university’s first deep learning course, CS231n, and he coined the term “vibe coding.”Open the full entry and John Schulman and building the web-agent platform World of Bits.⁠[1]

In 2017 the paper “World of Bits: An Open-Domain Platform for Web-Based Agents,” with Tianlin Shi as first author and co-authors including Andrej Karpathy and Percy Liang, appeared in the proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML); it argues that existing simulated environments lack the open-domain realism of computer vision and natural language processing tasks.⁠[2]

Cresta’s website says the company was born at the Stanford AI Lab in 2017 and co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, with co-founders Tim Shi, an early OpenAI researcher, and Zayd Enam; he is also listed on the company’s board of directors.⁠[3]

On his personal website he says he left his PhD to start Cresta and served as the company’s CTO; by his account, the team began deploying production large language models for Fortune 500 enterprises in 2018, and Cresta has since grown to about 600 people and more than $100 million in revenue.⁠[1]

South Park Commons’ company page lists Recursive Superintelligence with 2025 and San Francisco, names Josh TobinJosh TobinJosh Tobin is a machine learning researcher and entrepreneur who was a research scientist at OpenAI, co-founded the machine learning platform company Gantry, and is a member of the founding team of the AI research company Recursive Superintelligence.Open the full entry and Tim Shi as founders, and describes it as an AI research company building recursively self-improving systems that applies open-ended algorithms first to the science of AI itself. On his personal website he says the company is working to automate knowledge discovery.⁠[4][1]

In April 2026, Implicator.ai, citing the Financial TimesFinancial TimesThe Financial Times (FT) is a London-based English-language business and financial news organization, known for its salmon-pink newspaper and its motto “Without Fear and Without Favour.” It was owned successively by the British Pearson group and Japan’s Nikkei Inc., and today digital subscriptions are its main source of revenue.Open the full entry, listed him with Josh Tobin and Jeff CluneJeff CluneJeff Clune is an artificial intelligence researcher who is a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute; he works on open-ended algorithms and “AI-generating algorithms,” and in 2026 co-founded Recursive.Open the full entry as former OpenAI researchers on the founding team of Recursive Superintelligence. On May 13, 2026, GV announced that it was co-leading the company’s early $650 million funding at a $4.65 billion valuation and listed him among the seven co-founders alongside CEO Richard Socher.⁠[5][6]

OpenAI: Official website: https://openai.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Cresta: Official website: https://cresta.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

Recursive Superintelligence: Official website: https://www.recursive.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

Recursive Superintelligence: Official account: https://x.com/Recursive_SI (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

Personal website: Public link: https://shi.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/timshi_ai (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

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: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tianlinshi/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]