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Inaugural Research Fellowship

An instrument for
original discovery.

We are a frontier AI laboratory building a system that does not retrieve and recombine what is known, but reasons toward genuinely new understanding of the problems put to it. We are opening an inaugural fellowship for device physicists, chip designers, and electronics engineers to point it at the hardest unsolved problems in their field.

Semiconductors & Electronics · San Francisco Bay Area · Full-time · One-year appointment
Begin your application
The instrument

It is already producing results that do not yet exist in the literature.

On long-standing problems in optimization, the system has surpassed the best solutions ever found, compressing more than twenty years of cumulative progress. It has bettered expert teams in cardiac surgery and in vaccine design. It is in operation now.

We have demonstrated its power on a small number of problems. The purpose of this fellowship is to establish how far that power extends — across semiconductors and electronics, from logic design at advanced nodes to memory, analog and mixed-signal, and image sensors; from MEMS and sensors to power and RF devices; from photonics and AI-accelerator architecture to advanced packaging and lithography; and from device physics to fabrication, yield, and quantum hardware.

The fellowship

Not incremental work. Discoveries of the first rank.

As a Fellow, you will pursue the unsolved problems in your field that matter most to you — one, or several — and carry each from formulation to result: defining it, pursuing it on our discovery engine, validating your findings, and publishing them as lead author. Because the instrument compresses the cycle of discovery, some problems will yield in weeks while others hold you for much of the year. The pace, and the portfolio, are yours to set.

You would work under close and sustained mentorship, alongside a cross-disciplinary cohort of comparable ambition. Few are present, in any era, at the founding of a new instrument of discovery. You would belong to the first generation to discover with one.

The work

Where the work reaches in semiconductors and electronics.

A sample of the sub-fields in play — far from all of them:

Logic design at advanced nodes
Memory
Analog & mixed-signal
MEMS, sensors & image sensors
Power & RF devices
Photonics & AI-accelerator architecture
Advanced packaging & lithography
Device physics, fabrication & yield

If you hold a hard, unsolved problem in semiconductors and electronics — named here or not — it belongs here. This fellowship is defined by the problem, not the list.

Who we are seeking

The ability to learn, above prior experience with any method.

Appointment & support

What the year provides.

Apply

Bring the problem worth your year.

Your application is, in essence, a research proposal: the problem you would begin with, why the field has been unable to solve it, and what its solution would make possible. We give particular weight to problems whose answers can be proven rather than argued — settled against reality in weeks to months, not years. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Attach your full one-page proposal below if you have one.

Application received.

Thank you. We review applications on a rolling basis and will be in touch.