Tengyu Ma

Assist. prof. at Stanford; Co-founder and CEO of Voyage AI; Working on AI / ML / LLMs

Palo Alto, California, United States

About

homepage: https://ai.stanford.edu/~tengyuma/ I am an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford. My research interests broadly include topics in machine learning, algorithms and their theory, such as deep learning, (deep) reinforcement learning, pre-training / foundation models / large language models, robustness, non-convex optimization, distributed optimization, and high-dimensional statistics. Alumni of my Stanford lab: Ananya Kumar (Ph.D. 2023, co-advised with Percy Liang, research scientist at OpenAI) Yining Chen (Ph.D. 2023, research scientist at OpenAI) Shibani Santurkar (postdoc, now research scientist at OpenAI) Colin Wei (Ph.D. 2022, now research scientist at OpenAI) Honglin Yuan (Ph.D. 2022, now quantitative researcher at Citadel Securities) Yuanzhi Li (postdoc, now assistant prof. at CMU) Current Ph.D. students and post-docs Garrett Thomas Sang Michael Xie (co-advised with Percy Liang) Jeff Z. HaoChen Kefan Dong Hong Liu Zhiyuan Li (postdoc) Margalit Glasgow (co-advised with Mary Wootters) Arvind Mahankali Neil Band (co-advised with Tatsunori Hashimoto)

Experience

  • Chief AI Scientist at MongoDB
    Feb 2025 - Present · 1 yr 5 mos

    Voyage AI was acquired by MongoDB. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-24/mongodb-buys-voyage-ai-for-220-million-to-bolster-ai-search

  • Assistant Professor at Stanford University
    Sep 2018 - Present · 7 yrs 10 mos

  • Co-Founder and CEO at Voyage AI
    Jul 2023 - Mar 2025 · 1 yr 9 mos

  • Visiting Faculty at Google
    Jul 2022 - Jun 2023 · 1 yr

  • Visiting Scientist at Facebook
    Aug 2017 - Aug 2018 · 1 yr 1 mo