Aochong Oliver Li
About Me
Hi đź‘‹! I am Aochong Oliver Li (my friends usually call me Oliver), a second-year CS PhD student at Cornell University working with Prof. Tanya Goyal. Before that, I graduated from Columbia where I was advised by Prof. Zhou Yu and Prof. Smaranda Muresan. After college, I spent a year at AQR Capital as a quant researcher under Laura Serban.
I'm currently working on synthetic data for pre- and mid-training, the science of language models, and language model agents that can still learn after deployment (see Big World Hypothesis).
Outside of research, I enjoy seeking for insights from contrarian thinkers like Nietzsche, Machiavelli, and Peter Thiel.
What I Am Interested In
- The beauty of simplicity and inutition. This drew me into AI and Mathematics.
- I am trying to spend more time working on ambitious ideas, understanding the basics from first principles, and building mental models to handle noise in the world.
- I love visiting art and history museums around the world—favorites so far are The Met and The British Museum. Lately, I've been learning chess and making swimming a habit.