Hao Zhang@haozhangml
Can’t believe I get to say this -- deeply honored to be named a 2026 Sloan Research Fellow: today.ucsd.edu/story/2026-slo…
Early faculty life is… "hyper-intense": teaching, advising, hiring, papers, grants; and trying to build a lab culture you’ll still be proud of years later. There were many weeks where it felt like we were building the plane mid-flight, burning plenty of midnight oil along the way.
Over the past few years, I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with amazing students and collaborators on a chain of OSS project: Vicuna → Chatbot Arena → vLLM → DistServe → LMGame → FastVideo; each one then pushed forward way further by people far beyond our lab. This award feels less like a finish line and more like fuel for the lab, for our students, and for the next set of systems we haven’t built yet.
A core principle of us is building "open-source research that ships."
At the same time, it’s hard not to feel a mix of excitement + uncertainty + anxiety about where CS is heading. Coding agents are improving so fast that I am feeling the AGI first-handedly. I have gone back to builder mode -- only more productive than ever -- outside of my faculty admin work. I’ve watched friends and colleagues hit numbers that would’ve sounded like science fiction a year ago (e.g., 100+ commits/day).
So what does it mean to “do great computer science” when baseline productivity keeps jumping?
For me, it makes “research that ships” more important, and even raises the bar. The leverage shifts toward taste and problem selection, principled system design, and translating ideas into reliable artifacts. We're excited to keep proving that through real systems people can use!
Deeply grateful to:
- My students and collaborators — for the ideas, execution, and drive.
- @HDSIUCSD , Dean @GuptaUcsd, and my @UCSanDiego colleagues — for building an environment where ambitious work can happen.
- @nvidia and @mbzuai (and other compute sponsors) — for support that helped us move faster and turn ideas into real artifacts. Even as the interface changes, the need for efficient compute and solid infrastructure only grows.
Most of all: credit to the students at @haoailab. You’re the reason any of this is worth doing. Keep building and shipping!
