Jonghyun Choi

@ehsanik @Vercept_ai @AnthropicAI Big congratulations, Kiana!

This is a long post, mainly because I have a lot to say, but in case you are too busy: TLDR: @Vercept_ai is joining @AnthropicAI! We shared a mission, so we joined forces to accelerate it into reality. Couldn't be more excited! Why Vercept was started In 2024, AI coding tools were already becoming magical for developers, but other industries were ages behind. It felt insane that when my mom had IT issues, I still had to hop on a call and walk her through it step by step. Insane that sending a simple email took so many clicks. That's why we started @Vercept_ai : Build something that acts for users instead of telling them how to do it. Two goals: 1) help people do tasks they didn't know how to do, and 2) handle the zero-brainpower tasks so people spend more time on creative work. As simple as scheduling meetings, as complex as reconciling messy financials before tax season. Ultimate goal was to have people spend less time behind screens and more time walking in nature. (Very Pacific Northwest mission 😁) The ride The journey of building an AI native company in this day and age was wild. Going from researcher to founder meant trading “reviewer number 2” for business partners and users, but surprisingly a lot of the same paradigms applied. Come up with a hypothesis, design an experiment, analyze user behavior, change the model and product based on the findings, wash, rinse and repeat. There are some differences though. The pace and the adrenaline. Lows are low, highs are high. We were constantly being challenged and learned at a pace we had never learned before. NEVER! If you are an adrenaline junkie like we are, it's a blast. The joy of the startup adrenaline rush is truly underrated. Why Anthropic We raised more than $50M, had a comfortable runway and a successful product, were building full steam with a small team, and were truly enjoying every minute of it. But that's when the opportunity came to join forces with Anthropic. We already knew how great Anthropic was at building models and we admired their mission, but then we learned more about the vision. We went on hours of walks, had long conversations, talked to members across different orgs, and learned more about Anthropic's vision and commitment to core beliefs which were very similar to ours. The more we talked, the more we realized we had been working on the same mission but from complementary perspectives. We realized that joining forces meant we could build something much much bigger together. And beyond the mission, I am now a big believer that Anthropic's real moat isn't its best model. It's the people. Incredibly talented folks who genuinely care about mission and real impact over hype. A zero-ego culture obsessed with building something meaningful. The choices were clear: we could build independently and work toward the same vision as two separate versions of it, or join forces with an incredible team and accelerate that vision into reality. The decision became an easy choice. What's next for our mission Mission continues, just got a bigger stage and an expanded team. The goal is still to expand AI beyond just a chatbot, to enable non-technical users to leverage it just as much as technical ones. We're just getting started. It takes a village This journey wouldn't have happened without the people who made it what it was. First and foremost, my cofounders @LucaWeihs and @inkynumbers . Best people I could've wished for as cofounders. We never once got into an argument, always had communicative discussions and as a cherry on top shared the same sense of humor! I feel blessed and grateful to have these two in my life. Thankful to our team for trusting in the three of us and showing up day and night. Grateful for @sethbannon , our board member, lead investor, great mentor and the person whose energy is so infectious that whenever we were having a down moment we would say "channel your inner @fiftyyears energy!" And to our wonderful investors and supporters: @chrija and @PointNineCap , Yifan and Jacob and @ai2incubator , and @mattmcilwain and Ted Kummert from @MadronaVentures . Couldn't have done this without you. Onward 🐜

@RoozbehMottaghi It looks like Mohammad's car. :P

Only in the parking lot next to #NeurIPS2025

@vishalm_patel @jhuclsp @HopkinsEngineer Awesome! Congratulations @vishalm_patel !

Honored to be named an IEEE Fellow for contributions to image processing, computer vision & biometrics. Also grateful to be an AAAI Senior Member and a 2025 Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. Huge thanks to my students, mentors & collaborators! @jhuclsp @HopkinsEngineer

@mengyer Oh no

Well, someone registered my NeurIPS ticket… there will be two Mengyes in this year’s NeurIPS!

@ehsanik Cool! But your face doesn’t look like you’re in a beautiful place though :P

A Kiana in the wild running a 50k with 8k feet elevation gain in beautiful PNW fall!

Heading to Dagstuhl seminar 25432 - Deep Continual Learning in the Foundation Model Era. Excited to discuss with CL folks for a week. Thank you for the invitation! dagstuhl.de/de/seminars/se…

Join us at the 6th workshop on continual learning in computer vision (CLVision) @ICCVConference @ Room 304B on Mon Oct 20, 2025 Amazing lineup of speakers: @YiMaTweets, Eleni Triantafillou, Bing Liu, Josh Vogelstein, Tengda Han, Yichen Wu, @taesupmoon tinyurl.com/yvamr6re

Going well on Diamond Sponsor talks! #corl

@RanjayKrishna Gosh!

I am doing something silly by testing whether I can remember and deliver multiple talks on the same day on different slices of my group’s research. If you are at #CVPR2025 on June 11th, come to one or all of them :D 9:05am: Behaviors & bodies: how they shape one another (…models-meet-embodied-agents.github.io/cvpr2025/) 10:20am: Preparing perception for robotics (robo-3dvlms.github.io) 11:30am: Grounding VLMs for manipulation (robomani-grail.github.io) 1pm: Completely open foundation models for vision, navigation, & manipulation (computer-vision-in-the-wild.github.io/cvpr-2025/) 2:15pm: Scale can’t overcome pragmatics (sites.google.com/view/eval-fomo…) 4pm: Inducing diversity into models, interfaces, datasets, and algorithms (sites.google.com/view/cvpr-2025…)

@SenguptRoni @unccs Love to see @SenguptRoni and Hyojin!

Had a fun time attending @unccs Computer Vision past and present meetup at #CVPR2025 , missing a lot of folks though 😌

다시 만난 세계. 지금은 ...

Finally!

겨울에도 을밀대 줄은 길다. 춥고 배고프다 ㅜ

These days in South Korea make me read news everyday and almost every day it is painful, especially today. God bless this country.

@LucaWeihs @ehsanik @inkynumbers @mattdeitke Wish my very best to y’all my dear friends!

After many fantastic years at Ai2, I am so excited to say I have started a new company with some of the most intelligent, driven, and joyful people I know: Kiana (@ehsanik), Ross (@inkynumbers), and Matt (@mattdeitke).

@jbhuang0604 OMG!

The slide is bad, her response to an audience is even worse… “Maybe there is one, maybe they are common, who knows what. I hope it was an outlier."

📢 Don't miss the 5th workshop on Real-World Surveillance: Applications & Challenges at #WACV2025 in Arizona. 🏜️ Submit your papers by Nov 27th, 2024. More details here:

@SenguptRoni See you there!

Moving to 🦋 bluesky! Its really hard to open X everyday to find my feed flooded with anti-trans hate posts and comments with maximum visibility. I hope 🦋 will be a better community for scientific community and the broader public where hate is not amplified. Join me over there!

📢 Exciting News! The Fourth Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents (CoLLAs 2025) will be held at the University of Pennsylvania (@Penn) in Philadelphia, USA 🇺🇸 🗓️ Important Dates: Abstract Deadline: Feb 21, 2025 Submission Deadline: Feb 26, 2025 Conference Dates: Aug 11 - Aug 14, 2025 We invite submissions that present new theories, methodologies, applications, or insights into algorithms and benchmarks designed for non-i.i.d. and non-stationary settings. Accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR). 📚 Full CFP: lifelong-ml.cc/Conferences/20… #CoLLAs2025 #AI #MachineLearning #ContinualLearning #LifelongLearning #ResearchConference #CallForPapers #NonStationaryLearning