Jonathan Li

who am i?

I mostly grew up in Ontario. But a vivid year that's shaped my interests more than any other was the year I lived abroad in Hangzhou, at a public school when I was 8.

That year I spent evenings exploring our family laptop. I stumbled upon my brother's pirated version of the Adobe suite, and spent the next year learning how to edit and composite VFX videos in Adobe After Effects with online tutorials. I distincitly remember hogging the laptop for hours at a time waiting on renders, to my siblings' great annoyance.

At the end of that year I made my first dollar on Fiverr by helping people edit videos. I still remember how thrilling it felt to make something other people were willing to pay for, as someone who had just taught himself how to do that thing.

Not long after, I learned to code and became captivated by the magic behind a neural network. The product of my exploration was published NLP research (back when it was still called that) including a first-author paper at ACL 2023. When I was 17, I joined Cohere as their youngest researcher, where I worked on reasoning, long-context, and reinforcement learning infrastructure. Now, I'm building a company with my brother.

I’ve recently started thinking a lot about my path, which has given me a lot of conviction about how we should build the next generation of ai.