6h ago

Sarah Chieng, Cerebras head of DevX, says academic AI conferences have become VC deal-sourcing hubs as researchers transition to startups

High-profile transitions include Andrej Karpathy and Fei-Fei Li.

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Original post
OPSarah Chieng#1408Sarah Chieng@MILKSANDMATCHA

Andrej Karpathy and Fei Fei Li both did nearly 10 YEARS of higher education before eventually founding Eureka Labs and World Labs. If you have attended major AI conferences like ICML, ICLR, or NeurIPS recently, you will see that there is a huge shift of researchers pivoting to start companies, and a vast amount of VCs who now find deal flow from these conferences. It was interesting to sit down with Ajay Joshi, who did his postdoc at MIT, is a current professor and is now starting his own company, Ciphersonic. Presented with @cerebras // @alyciazcary

9:14 AM · May 26, 2026 View on X
REPLYrishi#223rishi@RISHIBOMMASANI

@MilksandMatcha Fei-Fei spent 20+ years as a professor and 30+ years in academia if you count her undergrad at Princeton and PhD at Caltech. And was Andrej's PhD adviser...

Sarah ChiengSarah Chieng@MilksandMatcha

Andrej Karpathy and Fei Fei Li both did nearly 10 YEARS of higher education before eventually founding Eureka Labs and World Labs. If you have attended major AI conferences like ICML, ICLR, or NeurIPS recently, you will see that there is a huge shift of researchers pivoting to start companies, and a vast amount of VCs who now find deal flow from these conferences. It was interesting to sit down with Ajay Joshi, who did his postdoc at MIT, is a current professor and is now starting his own company, Ciphersonic. Presented with @cerebras // @alyciazcary

4:14 PM · May 26, 2026 · 31.3K Views
5:26 PM · May 26, 2026 · 238 Views