The Extraordinary Fellowship Announces Inaugural Class of 25 Fellows

SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / January 16, 2025 /The Extraordinary Fellowship today announced its inaugural class of 25 fellows selected from more than 1,500 applicants worldwide. The fellowship brings together a cohort of exceptional technology innovators and provides each fellow with a grant of $5,000 of NVIDIA H100 compute, as well as mentorship from a network of founders, investors and engineering leaders.

The newly named Extraordinary Fellows were chosen by a panel of accomplished technology experts. Run by technologist Sigil Wen, with technical advisors including Marco Mascorro, Will Depue, Adam Majmudar, Diego Rodriguez, and William Lin, the Extraordinary Fellowship was started to, "empower the best technical talent who we believe will make a dent in the universe," said Wen. "Each of the fellows are prolific self-starters with insatiable curiosities for advancing the forefront of technology."

Meet the First Class of Extraordinary Fellows

Silas Alberti (X/Twitter) - Founding team member at Cognition AI, co-creator of Devin (the AI Software Engineer) and a large language model researcher at Google DeepMind and Stanford. He pioneered PIGEON, the first superhuman AI in GeoGuessr, and defeated pro player Rainbolt in a viral video.

Alishba Imran(X/Twitter) At 16, developed an open-source computer vision prosthetic arm, which led to joining Hanson Robotics to work on Sophia the Robot and co-lead research in neuro-symbolic AI. She has been a deep tech polymath and past researcher/engineer at the Arc Institute, Harvard Biodesign Lab, Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, Cruise, the Vector Institute and NVIDIA. She authored an O 'Reilly textbook, Machine Learning for Robotics.

Braden Boyko(X/Twitter) - Viral engineer behind the Beluga YouTube channel (10 million-plus subscribers and more than 2.4 billion views). The second-most viewed face reveal on the internet. Recipient of the Diamond Play Button.

James Lin(X/Twitter) - Neuroscience and deep learning researcher at MIT 's Boyden Lab, developing nanoimaging tools for whole-brain mapping.

Kenson Chung(LinkedIn) - Engineering savant, dropout and co-founder of Origami agents (YC F24) - AI research agents for GTM teams. It is the fastest-growing company in its YC batch and has raised $2.2M.

Toby Brown (X/Twitter)- Technical prodigy and founder of Beem Computer, a novel computing interface that has raised $1 million in funding

Miguel Piedrafita(X/Twitter) - Renowned "purple-haired 10X engineer" known for rapidly shipping innovative projects. Currently an engineer at Worldcoin.

Marvin Von Hagen(X/Twitter) - Co-founder of Interaction.co, a novel computing interaction company. A former researcher at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, he has been featured in Time, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

Gabriel Petersson(X/Twitter) - Working on Sora video generation at OpenAI. A high school dropout turned AI researcher, previously at Midjourney.

Jia Hu(X/Twitter) - Design engineer recognized for viral iOS concept designs, collectively amassing millions of views.

Felix Schlegel(X/Twitter) - Low-level computing expert and co-founder of Interaction.co. Formerly at Apple, where he integrated Apache Kafka into Swift and contributed to server-side Swift development.

Luke Piette(X/Twitter) - Founding team of RunPod, the AI GPU marketplace, which scaled to more than 200,000 developers and mid-eight figures in revenue.

Brendon Matusch (Twitter)-Built a self-driving go-cart at 14. Worked on dark matter detectors at SNOLAB, NLP at Midjourney in 2020, robot simulators at NVIDIA and intelligent sidewalk robots at HYPR. Stanford graduate and train enjoyer.

Sean Grindal(X/Twitter) - Founder and design engineer at Deco, with rebranding and application-building credits for DeFi.tech and Valour.com. His clients have collectively raised more than $300 million.

Om Agarwal (X/Twitter)- At 16, trained and productionized SOTA CNNs to detect breast density from mammograms for cancer diagnosis. Founder of Brightlight, applying AI for patient triage, intake, healthcare delivery, and EHR.

Sean Cheetham(X/Twitter) - Built Huff, the most used low-level EVM assembly language. Systems and cryptography engineer at Aztec.

Daniel Hong(X/Twitter) - Bitcoin contributor since 2008. Hacked the iPhone. Apple tried to sue him only to discover he was 11 years old, so they offered him an internship instead. Wrote one of the first Bitcoin GPU miners in CUDA

Ricardo de Arruda(X/Twitter) - Cryptographic data expert who built a blockchain fraud detection system that processed more than $4 billion last year-over half the industry 's total airdrop volume.

Daniel Guo (Linkedin) -Machine learning and biology researcher, currently working on genomic foundation models and adapter-guided protein design at the Arc Institute and Stanford AI Lab.

Dennis Jin (X/Twitter |LinkedIn) - A design engineer at Snap, spearheading product innovation, including Snapchat+ and the widely used captions tool.

Jonathan Lima (LinkedIn) - Technical prodigy and founding engineer at Brex ($12.3 billion valuation).

Ada Cyborg (Instagram) - Transhumanist technology designer and quantum computing artist, creator of the first neotranshumanist technology exhibition.

Brandon Leigh-Bennett (X/Twitter) - Graphics and AI developer creating model interpretability tools for large language models using WebGPU.

For a complete directory of fellows, visit: https://www.extraordinary.dev/directory

Applications are open for the next Extraordinary Fellowship cohort. To apply, visit https://join.extraordinary.dev/

For media inquiries, please contact:

Sigil Wen
sigil@extraordinary.dev
Extraordinary.dev

SOURCE:The Extraordinary Fellowship

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