{"id":37264,"date":"2025-11-01T07:11:31","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T07:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/leading-ai-researcher-eric-zelikman-is-raising-1-billion-to-build-ai-models-with-emotional-intelligence\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T07:11:31","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T07:11:31","slug":"leading-ai-researcher-eric-zelikman-is-raising-1-billion-to-build-ai-models-with-emotional-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/leading-ai-researcher-eric-zelikman-is-raising-1-billion-to-build-ai-models-with-emotional-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"Leading AI researcher Eric Zelikman is raising $1 billion to build AI models with emotional intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/690501060be9845f2dc58247?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Eric Zelikman recently appeared on the No Priors Podcast to discuss his next startup.\"\/><figcaption>Eric Zelikman recently appeared on the No Priors Podcast to discuss his next startup.<\/p>\n<p>YouTube<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Eric Zelikman is a top AI researcher who departed xAI in September and is getting his PhD at Stanford.<\/li>\n<li>He is raising $1 billion for his new startup at a $4 billion valuation, according to sources.<\/li>\n<li>His new startup, Humans&amp;, will build models that attempt to learn from and empathize with their users.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Eric Zelikman, a top AI researcher who departed xAI in September, is raising $1 billion at a $4 billion valuation for his new startup, Humans&amp;, according to sources with knowledge of the deal.<\/p>\n<p>Humans&amp;&#039;s eye-popping funding round comes amid a frenzy of early-stage AI deals, where valuations have soared despite limited products or revenue. Thinking Machines Labs, the AI firm started by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, raised $2 billion in a seed round earlier this year at a $12 billion valuation.<\/p>\n<p>Venture capitalists are pouring billions into startups led by prominent researchers, betting that the next breakthrough in AI will come from small, talent-rich teams.<\/p>\n<p>The round is still in progress, and terms could change. Zelikman did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n<p>Zelikman, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford, is best known for being the lead author of a paper last year detailing how language models can teach themselves to think before speaking. Before joining the technical staff at xAI in 2024, Zelikman was a machine learning intern at Microsoft and also a deep learning engineer at Lazard.<\/p>\n<p>Zelikman believes today&#039;s language models are too cold and machine-like, he told venture capitalist Sarah Guo on her podcast earlier this month.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The most fundamental thing is that the models kind of don&#039;t understand the long-term implications of the things that they do and say, when you treat every turn of a conversation as its own game,&quot; he said, adding that many AI researchers are focused on the wrong things. &quot;There&#039;s just so much talent out there, and I&#039;ve always been a little bit disappointed that so much of that talent doesn&#039;t get used.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Instead, Humans&amp; will build models that attempt to learn from and empathize with their users, Zelikman said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The actual objective of the model needs to be to kind of understand you,&quot; he said. &quot;It probably won&#039;t be perfect, but boy, you can be a lot better than the current models.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>With improved human-centric models, Zelikman believes AI can better achieve the lofty goals that have so far eluded it, like curing cancer.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We&#039;re much more likely to solve a lot of these fundamental human problems by building models that are really good at collaborating with large groups of people that are really good at understanding different people&#039;s goals, different people&#039;s ambitions, different people&#039;s values,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eric Zelikman recently appeared on the No Priors Podcast to discuss his next startup. YouTube Eric Zelikman is a top AI researcher who departed xAI in September and is getting his PhD at Stanford. He is raising $1 billion for his new startup at a $4 billion valuation, according to sources. His new startup, Humans&amp;, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37265,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-37264","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}