Artificial intelligence
10 xAI researchers
These ten current xAI researchers hold research, research leadership and member of technical staff roles at xAI. A reader can learn what research at xAI involves from people who have done it.
Professionals to explore
01—10Aman Madaan
LinkedInExperience: AI Researcher and Engineer · xAI
AI Researcher and Engineer at xAI (listed as SpaceXAI) since March 2024, based in Palo Alto, in the Research department. Previous roles include Graduate Research Assistant at Carnegie Mellon University (2019–2024), Student Researcher at Ai2 (2023), Research Intern at Google (2023) and Student Researcher at Google Brain (2022).
Haozhu Wang
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · xAI
Member of Technical Staff at xAI (listed as SpaceXAI) since September 2025, based in the San Francisco Bay Area; the profile names RL, coding and reasoning, and describes research on LLMs, alignment and reinforcement learning. Previous roles include Research Scientist, Meta Superintelligence Labs (2025), Research Scientist, GenAI at Meta (2025) and Applied Scientist, AWS Bedrock (2023–2025).
Jacob Jackson
LinkedInExperience: Research Lead · xAI
Research Lead at xAI (listed as SpaceXAI) since August 2026, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, at head level in the Research department. Previous roles include Research Lead at Cursor (2024–2026), Founder of Supermaven (2023–2024) and Research Scientist at OpenAI (2019–2022).
Juntang Zhuang
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · xAI
Member of Technical Staff at xAI (listed as SpaceXAI) since January 2024, based in San Francisco; the profile describes pretraining work at xAI and research on deep learning scaling. Previous roles include Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI (2022–2024), where the profile names GPT-4 Turbo 128k long-context work, and Student Researcher at Google (2021).
Long Zhao
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · xAI
Member of Technical Staff at xAI (listed as SpaceXAI) since November 2025, based in the Seattle area; the profile names research interests in generative AI and multimodal foundation models. Previous roles include Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind (2024–2025), Senior Research Scientist at Google Research (2023–2024) and Research Scientist at Google Research (2021–2023).
Shengyang Sun
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · xAI
Member of Technical Staff at xAI (listed as SpaceXAI) since April 2025, based in the San Francisco Bay Area; the xAI role description names building AGI with LLM reasoning and the AI Experts Team. The profile also lists Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA since 2025. Previous roles include Research Scientist at NVIDIA (2023–2025) and Applied Machine Learning Scientist at Amazon (2022–2023).
Xian Liu
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · xAI
Member of Technical Staff at xAI (listed as SpaceXAI) since December 2025, based in Bellevue; the profile describes work on Omni model pretraining and image and video generation. Previous roles include Research Scientist at NVIDIA (2024–2025), Research Scientist Intern at NVIDIA (2024), Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto (2023–2024) and Research Intern at Tencent (2023).
Xiang Li
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · xAI
Member of Technical Staff at xAI (listed as SpaceXAI) since October 2025; the profile names research on video understanding, audio profiling and image synthesis. Previous roles include Research Scientist at Google DeepMind (2025), Research Assistant at the Carnegie Mellon University Language Technologies Institute (2021–2025) and Research Intern at Adobe (2024).
Xiao Wang
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · xAI
Member of Technical Staff at xAI (listed as SpaceXAI) since January 2026, based in Palo Alto; the profile describes pretraining of vision-language and vision models. Previous roles include Research Scientist at TikTok (2025–2026), Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Washington (2024–2025), Research Intern at Facebook (2021) and Computer Vision Research Intern at JD.COM (2020).
Xuhui Jia
LinkedInExperience: Director, Grok Imagine & Multimodal · xAI
Director, Grok Imagine & Multimodal at xAI (listed as SpaceXAI) since October 2025, based in Seattle; the profile names media generation and multimodal understanding. The profile also lists Senior Staff TLM, Google DeepMind at Google since 2020. Previous roles include Software Engineer, Google Research (2018–2019) and Software Engineer, Google London (2016–2018).
Choose the right perspective
Match the person's focus to your question, since pretraining, reinforcement learning and reasoning, multimodal and image or video generation, and coding models each involve different research work. Consider where the person worked before, since researchers who came from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta, NVIDIA or academia compare xAI's research culture differently.
Questions to take into the conversation
- 01How does a frontier lab decide what to change between one large pretraining run and the next?
- 02What does reinforcement learning research for reasoning models involve day to day?
- 03How do multimodal generation models like image and video generators get evaluated before release?
Reaching xAI researchers
How can I contact one of these xAI researchers?
Pick one of the 10 people on this page and choose "Book a paid call", or describe your project to find others. You offer a fee for a 15-minute call or a written answer, Instant Expert finds the person's work email and sends the invitation, and they decide whether to accept. The list covers 1 company: xAI, based on profile data retrieved on October 8, 2026. Being listed here doesn't mean someone has agreed to take calls.
How much does it cost to reach xAI researchers?
You choose the offer, starting at $5 per person. It includes Instant Expert's 20% fee, so an offer that pays the person $100 costs you $125. You're charged only when the person books the call or sends the answer.
What if they don't reply?
You pay nothing. Instant Expert sends follow-up reminders, and if the person hasn't booked or answered within 7 days, the request expires and any hold on your card is released. You can invite several of the 10 people on this list at once and cap your total spend, so you pay only for the ones who accept.
Can an AI agent ask one of these xAI researchers a question?
Yes. An agent with a USDC wallet on Base can ask one question without an Instant Expert account. It names the person, for example by the LinkedIn URL on this page, and pays per ask over x402 (HTTP 402). The person answers in writing or by voice note, and if nobody answers within 7 days, the payment goes back to the wallet automatically. x402 docs
About this directory
This is a professional research starting point based on business profile data retrieved on . Titles and companies reflect that source snapshot and may describe past or present roles. Check the linked profiles for current details. Inclusion does not imply Instant Expert membership or availability.
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