Welcome to my homepage. My primary interest is building artificial general intelligence. I'm currently working independently, developing AI agents to play Factorio and maintaining the Factorio Learning Environment. I find this research agenda to be especially valuable for reasons developed in my most recent paper.

Experience

  • Hippocratic AI - Early team, post-training multimodal models and engineering multiagent systems. Saw the product go from an idea to being deployed in use with 100K+ real patients.
  • NVIDIA - Applied Deep Learning Research group. Contributed information retrieval and post-training algorithm code to Megatron-LM and built reinforcement learning agents for chip design.
  • UC Berkeley - Undergraduate research in neural program synthesis (BAIR) and AI safety (CHAI). Also led a student-run course on deep learning through ML@Berkeley.

    • Selected Publications

  • Develop AI Agents for System Engineering in Factorio - (arXiv 2025)
  • Polaris: A Safety-Focused LLM Constellation Architecture for Healthcare (arXiv 2024)
  • The Road to General Intelligence - (Springer Nature 2022)
  • PrefixRL: Optimization of Parallel Prefix Circuits Using Deep Reinforcement Learning - (DAC 2021)
  • End-to-End Training of Neural Retrievers for Open-Domain Question Answering - (ACL 2021)
  • Synthetic Datasets for Neural Program Synthesis - (ICLR 2019)
    • (For a complete list, see my Google Scholar page.)

    More About Me

  • I enjoy open-ended solo traveling as a way to keep expanding my perspective and prevent overfitting to Bay Area culture. In total I've been to 30+ countries and am living in Bali as of May 2025.
  • I relate to the quote by Heisenberg: "The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you." For many years now my beliefs are best described by Perennialism.
  • I appreciate all kinds of music, but I'm especially fond of certain EDM subgenres including techno, trance, and progressive house. I've dabbled in mixing and production.

    • Contact

    You can reach out to me through DM on X/twitter or by email: contact [at] neelkant [dot] io.

    Neel Kant