Yuandong Tian

According to his personal website, he received a PhD from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry in 2013; that year, his work on Hierarchical Data-Driven Descent received an honorable mention for the ICCV Marr Prize.⁠[1]

From 2013 to 2014 he worked on Google’s self-driving car team.⁠[1]

In November 2015 he and Yan Zhu posted the paper “Better Computer Go Player with Neural Network and Long-term Prediction” on arXiv, describing a neural network–based Go program; it reported that the darkfmcts3 version reached a stable 5d level on the KGS Go Server and placed third in the January KGS Go Tournament.⁠[2]

In February 2019 the paper “ELF OpenGo: An Analysis and Open Reimplementation of AlphaZero,” with him as first author, was submitted to arXiv and appeared in the proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). The paper describes ELF OpenGo as an open-source reimplementation of the AlphaZero algorithm and the first open-source Go AI to convincingly demonstrate superhuman performance, with a 20:0 record against top professionals worldwide, and says its code, models and self-play data were made publicly available.⁠[3][4]

According to his personal website, his DirectPred work received an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention at ICML 2021, and CompilerGym received a Distinguished Paper Award at CGO 2022.⁠[1]

His personal website says he is a co-founder of Recursive Superintelligence Inc. and was previously a research scientist director at Meta FAIR, and that during his time at Meta GenAI he co-led reasoning work on Llama 4.⁠[1]

On May 13, 2026, GV announced that it was co-leading Recursive Superintelligence’s early $650 million funding at a $4.65 billion valuation and listed him among the seven co-founders alongside CEO Richard Socher. The company’s website says its aim is to automate knowledge discovery through recursive self-improving superintelligence.⁠[5][6]

Carnegie Mellon University: Official website: https://www.cmu.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Recursive Superintelligence: Official website: https://www.recursive.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1][6]

Recursive Superintelligence: Official account: https://x.com/Recursive_SI (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

Personal website: Public link: https://yuandong-tian.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

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

Google Scholar: Public profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0mgEF28AAAAJ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]