Alex L. Zhang

Hi! I broadly work on areas where language models are underutilized or inefficient. I am currently a PhD student at MIT CSAIL advised by Omar Khattab and Tim Kraska.

Some notable things worth mentioning:

• Introduced Recursive Language Models (RLMs).
• Part of the core team running the GPU MODE competitions and community.
• Graduated as the top student of the Princeton CS department, and fortunate to have been advised by Karthik Narasimhan, Khanh Nguyen, Ofir Press, and Kai Li.

I’ve had brief but pleasant stints at a variety of companies: Sakana AI, VantAI, Snap Research, Apple, and Claryo.

research highlights:

• ML Systems. Recursive Language Models (RLMs) (2025), Project Popcorn 🍿 (2025), Triton kernels for OSS AlphaFold3 (1k+ ⭐'s) (2024)
• 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)

Feel free to reach out to talk about anything through my email at [x]@mit.edu where [x]=altzhang. Finally, I’m also fairly active in and help moderate the GPU MODE community. As a last fun fact, I used to make and sell PC games, one of which was mildly successful (~100k+ players). [unfinished example]