A former Nvidia researcher who left the chip giant for academia shares why AI models should be open source and free for all

Casey Rodgers

While the tech industry races to build language-learning models for AI, researcher Anima Anandkumar focuses on how AI can simulate the physical world, from predicting climate patterns to redesigning proteins in medicine. The former Nvidia senior director of AI research and Amazon Web Services alum spent decades working at the forefront of AI algorithms and helped make Nvidia's FourCastNet weather simulator available as open source. She has served as the Bren Professor in the computer science and mathematics department at Caltech since 2017 and oversees the university's machine learning research efforts. Specifically, she focuses on tensors, a multilinear function that can help solve higher-order problems in AI, like modeling fluids.