Meet the Team

Hey I'm Louis, CEO of OpenWorld Labs. I'm incredibly excited to be doing an open science lab, returning to my roots of decentralized research. We believe that the future of world models requires a variety of different perspectives to truly consider what is best for the community, and we're incredibly excited to be building alongside everyone. I have half a decade in large scale open science experience and have worked at a number of large labs, previously leading CarperAI – for a time the largest open science LLM post training group, releasing what was at the time the most popular post training framework, trlX. I have also worked as Head of LLMs at Stability AI and a co-founder/member of technical staff at SynthLabs where I worked on reasoning models, tool use, and synthetic data.

Hello everyone, I'm Shahbuland: CSO of OpenWorld Labs. I've loved video games since I was two years old and my older cousins (irresponsibly) let me play Mortal Kombat on the original PlayStation. I became captivated early on by the concepts of AI and VR. I became obsessed with the dream of what I saw as the ultimate video game: A fully immersive experience, akin to a lucid dream, where you can guide the world being built around you based on your personal preferences and desires. I previously co-founded CarperAI with Louis, where I worked on representation learning and RLHF, which I continued at StabilityAI working on alignment for text-to-image models. After that I went around some startups, working on diffusion, multimodality, and world models. The last one stuck, as it seems to be the first tangible way to make my dream a reality. So now, at OpenWorld Labs, I am building the experience I've dreamed of playing my whole life.

Hey, I'm Spencer and I am excited to be joining two amazing founders at the beginning of Open World Lab's journey as a Founding Advisor. It has been a passion and profession of mine to support accomplished engineers and researchers in the rapidly advancing field of AI for quite some time now. I've been enthusiastic about gaming since I was young. The worlds of computer science, AI, research, startups, angel investing and established industry took a little more convincing. I look forward to supporting such a promising team and will always continue to support groundbreaking ideas, products and ethical, open science in any form. OpenWorld Labs is the intersection of many of my passions and represents the core of my professional ethos.

Hello, I'm Eric: Member of Technical Staff at OpenWorld Labs. Growing up I've always enjoyed gaming, which has led to me work on large scale orchestration systems and 3D graphics. I'm happy to be joining OpenWorld Labs to work at the intersection of these 2 problems. I have half a decade of experience building large scale systems and tools. Most recently leading 936 Labs, I architected distributed GPU pipelines for video data labeling and API inference. Before that I worked at Reka AI as a Member of Technical Staff working on agent orchestration and product. I have also worked at DeepAI as a researcher where I built a synthetic video generation framework for text-to-video generation, distributed GPU orchestration, as well as the some of the early datasets and finetuning scripts for video models like CogVideoX and OpenSoraPlan. All these experiences has now led me to OpenWorld Labs where I'll be powering a new frontier of reality.

Hey, I'm Sami, Member of Technical Staff at OpenWorld Labs. Growing up, I played endless hours of Dota 1 and Dota 2, oftentimes against bots, since internet connectivity was rare and unreliable. I had my first real experience with AI When OpenAI's Dota agent released, and it solved the game I spent a decade learning. This led me to start my journey at CarperAI working on RLHF for language models alongside Louis and Shahbuland. After that, I built planet-scale data pipelines at Bloomberg and conducted research on self-supervised learning and video generation for robotics at Brown. I'm convinced that world models will be the most important leap forward in AI, and, the key to truly immersive gaming. Working with this incredible team at OpenWorld Labs feels like the perfect way to turn that my original fascination into something that could change how we experience virtual worlds entirely.

Hey there, I'm Ben - as a lifelong gamer this fed my interest in graphics and procedural generation. My most recent work is as a Senior Research Scientist at Unity Technologies at the intersection of machine learning and graphics (generative 3D) applying machine learning to support artistic workflows in game development (such as asset creation / retrieval, generative digital humans / neural fields for 3d hairstyles). Previously, I dabbled (co-founder) in a few early stage startups in VR / AI and cloud gaming, I also spent time as a Research Scientist at New York University - Courant.