@samuel_ys92: Bonnie Li 24 years old, has contributed to Gemini, Genie, and SIMA, and has now joined OpenAI. Bonnie Li announced on S…

Bonnie Li

24 years old, has contributed to Gemini, Genie, and SIMA, and has now joined OpenAI.

Bonnie Li announced on September 16 that she’s joining OpenAI as a research scientist. Her own words: the first time she “felt the AGI,” she couldn’t sleep that night anymore.

Looking back at her starting point, it’s a bit wild. In 2019, at 17 years old, she was doing reinforcement learning research at Mila in Montreal, guided by Yoshua Bengio; that same year, she took the stage at the RE•WORK summit and was selected as one of the 30 Under 30 rising AI women stars. And the way she got into it was through an online Udacity course—those few repos on her GitHub (Reacher, Tennis, Pyramid) are exactly the assignments from that course.

After that, she studied math and computer science at McGill, did undergrad research under Joelle Pineau, and published a first-author paper on zero-shot generalization in reinforcement learning. In January 2022, she joined Google DeepMind, graduated with her bachelor’s in December of that year, and switched to research scientist in October 2023.

At DeepMind, she worked on world models and embodied intelligence: the official blog for Genie 2 lists her as a key contributor, she’s a named author on SIMA 2, and she’s credited on the technical reports for Gemini 2.5 and 3.

Now she’s headed to OpenAI to work on “aligned superintelligence.” From an online course to here, seven years.

Bonnie Li (@bonniesjli): Excited to share that I’ve recently joined @OpenAI!

“Felt the AGI” for the first time - and couldn’t fall asleep afterwards.

Honored to work towards aligned superintelligence. We live in extraordinary times, and the next few months will be critical.