Jim Fan

NVIDIA Director of AI & Distinguished Scientist. Co-Lead of Project GR00T (Humanoid Robotics) & GEAR Lab. Stanford Ph.D. OpenAI's first intern. Solving Physical AGI, one motor at a time.

Stanford, California, United States

About

We were born too late to explore the earth and too early to explore the galaxies. We were born just in time to solve robotics. I'm on a mission to make Physical AI a reality, one motor at a time. Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/DrJimFan Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sljtWIUAAAAJ&hl=en My email can be found here: https://jimfan.me

Experience

  • NVIDIA (Full-time · 4 yrs 7 mos)
    • Director & Distinguished Research Scientist
      2025 - Present · 1 yr 5 mos

      Solving Physical AI. Spearheading Project GR00T: foundation models and techniques for general-purpose robotics. Co-leading GEAR team.

    • Senior Manager & Principal Research Scientist
      2024 - 2025 · 1 yr

      I co-founded a new research team called "GEAR" (Generalist Embodied Agent Research) at NVIDIA. We believe in a future where every machine that moves will be autonomous, and robots and simulated agents will be as ubiquitous as iPhones. We are building the Foundation Agent — a generally capable AI that learns to act skillfully in many worlds, virtual and real. 2024 is the Year of Robotics, the Year of Gaming AI, and the Year of Simulation. We are setting out on a moon-landing mission, and getting there will spin off mountains of learnings and breakthroughs.

    • Senior Research Scientist
      2023 - 2024 · 1 yr

      Lead of Voyager, Eureka, Prismer, VIMA, MineDojo, and other works on multimodal foundation models for AI agents, robotics, game AI, and simulation.

  • Computer Science PhD student at Stanford University
    Sep 2016 - Sep 2021 · 5 yrs 1 mo

    Ph.D. advised by Prof. Fei-Fei Li. Research in deep reinforcement learning, robotics, computer vision, and large-scale distributed learning.

  • Research Intern at NVIDIA
    Jun 2020 - Sep 2020 · 4 mos

    Deep reinforcement learning.

  • Research Intern at OpenAI
    May 2016 - Jan 2017 · 9 mos

    I was the very first intern of OpenAI since its founding. Co-developed the OpenAI Universe Initiative. Coauthored World of Bits (ICML 2017), the first AI agent that learns to control the web browser through keyboard and mouse.

  • Research Intern at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute
    Sep 2015 - Sep 2016 · 1 yr 1 mo

    Research assistant advised by Prof. Yoshua Bengio and Prof. Aaron Courville on deep semi-supervised learning.