Niel Jongwhan Ok

i'm currently building Null Labs as cofounder/CTO. i previously studied at Stanford.

About Me

• grew up across Louisiana, Colorado, Texas, Ohio
• got my start in AI in 2018 building cv for medical imaging & infra for parallel experimentation
• wrote a quantum simulator sponsored by Google Quantum at 15 after discovering ER=EPR. led to long-term fascination with simulation
• studied EE at Stanford
• curiosity about the brain led me to neuroscience theory research at Brains in Silicon
• an interest in encoded learnable structures set off experiments building things like operating systems and statistical models of evolution before training neural nets on them
• spent time at a stealth DeepMind spinout (hire number 2) working on automating AI research
• co-founder/CTO of Null Labs, using computable physics to train autonomous systems

Thoughts

• we'd learn a lot about human neural circuits from neural nets that are first trained to perform generally in the physical world along with similar agents before being trained on language
• infrastructure for rendering at scale is underrated
• realism is not sufficient
• knowledge becomes sticky when you start trying to develop your own theories
• physics, math, language, and computation have generative asymmetry. there may be reasons for this structure
• science was born from a new standard for knowledge. we should revisit this more