This Thurs, Sept 28: Imbue co-founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht join for first public appearance together since announcing $200M Series B
Talking about Imbue's work building agents that can reason and code
This Thursday, I’m interviewing Imbue co-founders Kanjun Qiu (CEO) and Josh Albrecht (CTO) in their first public appearance together since announcing their $200M Series B!
Imbue builds AI systems that can reason and code, reinventing the personal computer to help us accomplish larger goals in the world.
The company is now valued at more than $1 billion, and backed by top investors including NVIDIA, Kyle Vogt (co-founder of Cruise), and Simon Last (co-founder of Notion).
If you haven’t yet, check out the official announcement in Forbes. And take a look at their careers page, as they’re hiring fast!
Fireside Details
When: Thursday, Sept 28, 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM in SF. Doors open a 5PM
Where: NotionHQ in the Mission
Join in person: Apply here to join
Join via live stream: Watch here
Host: Outset Capital and Imbue
More info
Topics we’ll cover:
Building agents that can reason and code
Why they think agents are the next frontier
Kanjun & Josh’s founder journey
Lessons learned from their two previous companies together
Investing in other AI startups
Kanjun’s Background
Kanjun is the co-founder and CEO of Imbue (fka Generally Intelligent), an AI research company working directly on human-like general intelligence. She also co-founded and was CEO of Sourceress, an AI recruiting company that went through YC and raised $13M
She’s also a General Partner at early-stage AI fund Outset Capital
She works with Michael Nielsen on essays investigating the processes, progress, and science of science
Kanjun previously grew Dropbox from 300 to 1500 people as the company’s first Chief of Staff. She also co-authored Sew Electric, a book that teaches kids programming using sewable electronics, and tinkered with hardware at the MIT Media Lab. She also danced competitively at MIT!
Josh’s Background
Josh leads all Imbue’s technical work, including driving the overall research direction, managing the development of foundation models and overseeing backend product development. He’s also co-authored multiple recent papers including:
A safety paper on the limitations of LLM ethical decision-making
CARBS, a cost-aware hyperparameter tuner which can automatically discover both the scaling laws for every hyperparameter and the best-performing network for every compute budget
The first compelling scientific picture of the training process of large-scale self-supervised learning methods
He’s also a General Partner at early-stage AI fund Outset Capital
Josh also co-founded a 3D injection molding software company that was acquired. He helped build Addepar as an early engineer and served as a Thiel Fellow Mentor
He started programming as a kid and built his own computer games, and began working professionally as a software engineer in high school
Upcoming Thursday Nights in AI events:
Thurs, Oct 12: NVIDIA AI Senior Research Scientist, Dr. Jim Fan
Thurs, Oct 26: OpenAI Research Scientist, Dr. Richard Ngo
Thurs, Nov 2: Glean CEO, Arvind Jain
See the full list of upcoming events HERE.