Theoretical Physicist turned AI Researcher.
Quantum Physics and Artificial Intelligence.
Shunyu Yao is currently a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at Anthropic, where his work focused on the "science of learning" and improving model capabilities for the Claude family.
Before his pivot to Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Yao was a theoretical physicist. He completed his PhD at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics under Douglas Stanford and Stephen Shenker. His academic roots trace back to the Institute for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University, where he worked with Zhong Wang.
He is known for his foundational work in physics on the Non-Hermitian Skin Effect and Scramblon Theory, and more recently for his contributions to Agentic Coding in Large Language Models.
"My infant year as an AI researcher"
Reflections on transitioning from theoretical physics to the frontier of AI.
Read Article"My old personal website"
Without Gemini, this is what I can do with creating a website :)
Read ArticleBachelor in IAS. Discovered the Non-Hermitian Skin Effect.
PhD in Theoretical Physics. Focused on Quantum Black Holes, Holography, and Scramblon Theory.
Short Postdoc at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics.
Research Scientist. Contributed to Claude 3.7 (Agentic coding) and Claude 4 family (RL numerics).
Senior Staff Research Scientist. Focusing on new generation RL algorithms.
Developed core capabilities for agentic coding and tool use in large-scale reinforcement learning systems. These contributions were integrated into the Claude 3.7 release.
Focused on the fundamental science of Reinforcement Learning hyperparameters and the stability of numerics in large-scale training runs.
Developed the theory of "Scramblons" to describe the dynamics of complex quantum systems, quantum black holes, and their relation to quantum information.
Discovered that in open quantum systems, eigenstates can localize at the boundaries (Skin Effect), a finding that reshaped the understanding of topological phases of matter.