Dear Friends,
Meta has assembled a "Superintelligence" AI team. This dream team is more than just a collection of coders—it’s a convergence of brilliant minds shaped by elite education, relentless curiosity, and psychological depth.
I'm curious about where they studied, what they did, and what kind of skills they possess. Many of them come from institutions like Stanford, Princeton, Tsinghua, and IIT. Their résumés boast stints at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic. Many began their journeys with research assistant roles and internships at Adobe, Facebook, and Google Brain—developing meta-skills early in their careers.
If I had to summarize their cognitive archetypes, here’s how I would do it:
• The Researcher (e.g., Shengjia Zhao, Stanford PhD): Focused on theoretical purity and experimental control.
• The Builder (e.g., Shuchao Bi, YouTube Shorts co-founder): Driven by execution, systems thinking, and a strong product-to-research feedback loop.
• The Synthesizer (e.g., Huiwen Chang, Google Research + OpenAI): Excels in cross-modal creativity and possesses a design-thinking mindset.
These individuals work on complex topics like multi-agent systems, human-AI alignment, and interpretability—fields that require not just logic, but also empathy.
For example:
• Shuchao Bi transitioned from Zhejiang University to graduate work at UC Berkeley, blending mathematical depth with real-world impact at YouTube and OpenAI.
• Shengjia Zhao and Huiwen Chang, both Tsinghua alumni, pursued doctoral research at Stanford and Princeton, exemplifying the Yao Class tradition of academic brilliance.
• Jiahui Yu, a prodigy from USTC’s School of the Gifted Young, earned a PhD at UIUC, specializing in computer vision and generative models.
• Trapit Bansal, trained in India’s IIT system, sharpened his machine learning focus at UMass Amherst, balancing theoretical clarity with application.
• Shuyao Bi, who moved from Shanghai Jiao Tong University to Carnegie Mellon, showcases the practical backbone of real-time systems engineering.
You might be wondering, what’s the story for today?
About 4–5 years ago, in one of my talks, I mentioned that the world will eventually have only five types of jobs:
1. Entrepreneur
2. AI Trainer/Tuner
3. Prompt Engineer (including Agents and Agentic AI)
4. Design Thinker
5. AI General User (many existing jobs fall under this category—e.g., personalized content curation like reels)
It now seems that investments and talent are aligning in this direction.
If we map qualities and skills to these five types:
• Entrepreneur – Risk appetite and a problem-solving mindset through product or service innovation
• AI Trainer/Tuner – Mathematical and statistical intelligence, computational power, broad domain understanding, and mastery of algorithms
• Prompt Engineer – Use-case orientation and the ability to apply AI in real-world contexts
• Design Thinker – Empathy combined with experiential innovation (balancing business affordability, human desirability, and technical feasibility)
• AI User – Anyone who uses AI tools in daily life (e.g., customized content, virtual assistants, etc.)
Every student should reflect on their own strengths and align with one of these types during their UG/PG journey. Doing so can enhance both employability and sustainability in their career.
Which type are you?
Ravi Saripalle
