Title: Michigan Duo Rejects Musk’s Offer to Pioneer AI Advancements
Two 22-year-old friends from Michigan, William Chen and Guan Wang, have turned down a multimillion-dollar offer from Elon Musk to revolutionize Artificial Intelligence (AI) through their startup, Sapient Intelligence. This ambitious duo aims to develop an innovative technology that could outpace leading competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. Their journey began in high school, driven by shared “metagoals” related to solving complex problems and optimizing systems.
After collaborating at Tsinghua University, they created OpenChat, a language model that garnered attention for its unique reinforcement learning capabilities. Following Musk’s offer, they opted to pursue their vision of overcoming the limitations of large language models. Their breakthrough, the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), mimics human thought processes and demonstrates superior performance in abstract reasoning tasks, including advanced Sudoku and maze navigation. With Sapient Intelligence, Chen and Wang are focused on achieving true artificial general intelligence.
