Jim Fan

Jim Fan is a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA and Lead of AI Agents Initiative, dedicated to constructing versatile agents capable of operating in both physical realms such as robotics and virtual environments like games and simulations. With a Ph.D. from Stanford Vision Lab under the guidance of Prof. Fei-Fei Li, he has interned at prestigious institutions including OpenAI, Baidu AI Labs, and MILA, collaborating with luminaries such as Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, Andrew Ng, Dario Amodei, and Yoshua Bengio. Graduating as the Valedictorian of Class 2016 and honored with the Illig Medal at Columbia University, he has led groundbreaking projects like Voyager, MineDojo, Eureka, and VIMA, which have pushed the boundaries of multimodal foundation models, reinforcement learning, computer vision, and large-scale systems. Notably, MineDojo received the Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. His contributions have been extensively covered in renowned media outlets such as the New York Times, Forbes, MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, The WIRED, and VentureBeat. A noteworthy aspect of his career includes being OpenAI’s inaugural intern in 2016, where he laid the groundwork for projects like World of Bits, predating the era of large language models at OpenAI.