Alex L. Zhang

Hi 👋! I broadly work on problems related to evaluating language model capabilities, systems programming for machine learning, and AI for science. I co-lead the GPU MODE leaderboard, which most recently hosted a $100k competition with AMD.

I will be a PhD student at MIT CSAIL starting Fall 2025. For the past year I’ve been working as a researcher at VantAI working on AI-based drug discovery.

Before that, I graduated as the top student of the Princeton CS department, where I was blessed with amazing mentors: Professor Karthik Narasimhan, Dr. Khanh Nguyen, Dr. Ofir Press, and Professor Kai Li. Before that, I used to make and sell PC games, one of which was mildly successful (~100k+ players). [example]

research highlights:

• Language Model Benchmarks. VideoGameBench (2025), KernelBench (ICML, 2025), SWE-bench Multimodal (ICLR, 2025)
• Models. Neo-1 (2025), KernelLLM-8B (2025), Language-guided World Models (SpLU-RoboNLP @ ACL, 2024)
• ML Systems. Project Popcorn 🍿 (2025), Triton kernels for OSS AlphaFold3 (2024)

Feel free to reach out to talk about anything through my email at [x]@mit.edu where [x]=altzhang. It’s not obvious from my research, but I spent most of my undergrad studying math + CS theory and love to chat about it! On that topic, check out my college roommate Evan’s math reading list! Finally, I’m also very active in the GPU MODE community and co-lead the GPU programming leaderboard.