Rico Zhu
Member Of Technical Staff at xAI
Durham, North Carolina, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRico Zhu is a Member of Technical Staff at xAI with eight years of hands-on experience building and researching ML systems, currently focused on multimodal pretraining and post-training reasoning. A Duke CS & Math undergraduate researcher, he has contributed to theoretical work on induction heads in Transformers and practical ML for high-energy physics at CERN, applying graph neural networks to real ATLAS data. Rico’s background spans both research and production: optimizing deep-learning inference at Tenstorrent, developing auto-graders and course infrastructure as a head TA, and publishing interpretable-ML and GNN work in KDD and AAAI. He combines strong mathematical foundations with systems-level engineering, and has a knack for turning theoretical insights into scalable model and pipeline improvements. Notably, his early work ported ML models onto distributed CERN compute and experimental AI hardware simulators, bridging cutting-edge research and deployment.
8 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Mathematics and Computer Science at Duke UniversityTelluride Association Summer Program (TASP)
Chinese, English, French
Stackoverflow
53reputation
7kreached
3answers
3questions
Github Skills (36)
robot10
robotics9
ros9
marine7
duke7
html6
clipboard6
google-chrome-extension6
google-chrome6
solve6
javascript6
stochastic-processes5
dynamical-systems5
numerical-integration5
numerical4
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
Hack-the-Northeast/Website-2020
Feb 2020 - May 2020
The source code for the website of Hack the Northeast 2020
Contributions:44 PRs, 126 pushes, 3 branches in 2 months
javascriptreact
EmilyGoose/HackTheNorth2019
Sep 2019 - Sep 2019
Contributions:45 commits in 1 day
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