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We’re just one month removed from our first Felicis Fellows in AI cohort.
We started the program because we saw a need for a program to expose the best AI and ML students to the world of entrepreneurship. The week included intention-setting hikes, a Giants game, an intro to the world of VC and startups, and an informal Q&A with some of the top AI founders today including founders Isaac Evans of Semgrep, Ari Morcos, and Bogdan Gaza of Datology, and Lukas Biewald of Weights and Biases, Harrison Chase of Langchain, Beyang Liu of Sourcegraph, Matan Grinberg of Factory, Piero Molino of Predibase, Anthony Goldbloom of Kaggle, Nikola Borisov of DeepInfra, Mike Knoop of Zapier and ARC Prize, Jerry Liu of LlamaIndex, and Seth Forsgren of Riffusion.
But the true highlight was being on the ground floor of the start of a wonderful new community and seeing four of the Fellows teams win a $50K prize. I personally found it immensely rewarding to contribute to the professional journeys of some of the smartest people I’ve encountered. I genuinely believe I was in the presence of the next generation of entrepreneurs and AI practitioners, which was incredibly invigorating. I felt proud of everyone in the group for investing a week in themselves, learning to marry research with commercial viability, sharing their work in front of an audience, and demonstrating the hustle and grit that often diminishes as careers progress. Everyone contributed to making this a community we’re proud to support.
Winners of the prizes included:
- Team 1: LLMs for Gene Discovery Abhinav Adduri (CMU Bio + AI PhD), Adhya Dhyar (CMU AI/ML Masters)
- Team 2: Debugging LLMs Spruce Campbell (MIT), Will Hathaway (MIT)
- Team 3: Alternative Model Architectures to Transformers Alex Li (CMU AI/ML PhD)
- Team 4: AI Agent for Delightful Travel Chris Chou (Berkeley AI Masters)
Here’s how two Fellows described the week:
“Every so often, you meet people whose passion and dedication truly stand out, and this experience has pushed me to improve myself. Being around others who are so committed to learning and building has been inspiring. Felicis has been an excellent place for growth. Hearing from founders about their experiences in starting companies from scratch has been incredibly valuable. It made me feel that achieving such goals is possible and deepened my understanding of building AI applications and go-to-market strategies. I'm eager to delve deeper into the product and GTM aspects, and I've been fortunate to learn about these firsthand here. This has been a truly holistic learning experience.”
— Adhya Dhyar
“The first thing that hit me was how nice the Felicis people were. And the Fellows group has been so good because everyone here is incredibly kind and smart. You can have these intense deep conversations one minute and then a chat about all this cool research the next. There's not a single person in the group that I wouldn't consider a friend.”
— Spruce Campbell
And here are some of the highlights:
This program wouldn’t have been successful without the support of Aydin Senkut, Sundeep Peechu, Astasia Myers, James Detweiler, Gabriella Garcia, Laura Buhler, Mischa Vaughn, Angelina Shamilov, and the fantastic team at AWS for providing compute resources.
We can’t wait to expand this community next year. If you run a machine learning program at a university, can provide resources to future or past Felicis Fellows, or are a founder of an AI startup, please contact us at fellows@felicis.com about how to get involved next year.
