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Michigan Duo Rejects Musk, Aims to Revolutionize AI

11/29/2025

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Summary

Story summary

William Chen and Guan Wang, from Michigan, declined Elon Musk's multimillion-dollar offer to pursue Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) at Tsinghua University.
They aim to outperform existing large-language models by mimicking human thought processes.
Their prototype, with 27 million parameters, surpassed major AI systems in reasoning.
Sapient Intelligence plans to expand in the United States and continue developing its model, and it believes AGI could emerge within a decade.

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Story summary

William Chen and Guan Wang, from Michigan, declined Elon Musk's multimillion-dollar offer to pursue Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) at Tsinghua University.
They aim to outperform existing large-language models by mimicking human thought processes.
Their prototype, with 27 million parameters, surpassed major AI systems in reasoning.
Sapient Intelligence plans to expand in the United States and continue developing its model, and it believes AGI could emerge within a decade.