Two 22-year-old friends from Michigan made headlines in the AI world by turning down a multimillion-dollar offer from Elon Musk to pursue their own startup, Sapient Intelligence.
William Chen and Guan Wang, who met in high school, aimed to build an algorithm capable of solving any problem.
Their first success, OpenChat, drew Musk’s attention, but they declined his proposal.
Instead, they developed the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), which reportedly outperforms leading AI systems in complex reasoning tasks.
In June, their prototype with just 27 million parameters surpassed models from OpenAI and Anthropic on advanced benchmarks.
Chen says the HRM model “thinks” rather than guesses and has already matched state-of-the-art results in weather prediction, quantitative trading, and medical monitoring. Sapient Intelligence plans to open a US office soon.
