Michael Poli

Staff Scientist at Together.
Computer Science Ph.D. Student at Stanford.
machine learning ∩ systems ∩ signal processing

Advised by Stefano Ermon. Working closely with friends at Hazy Research. Affiliated with Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM).

News:

  • Mar, 2024
    New research on mechanistic architecture design and scaling laws. Most extensive scaling laws analysis for emerging architectures to date.
  • Feb, 2024
    We released a new frontier model for biology, Evo! Based on the StripedHyena architecture: Blog.
  • Jan, 2024
    Podcast on efficient AI architectures for language and beyond: Interconnects.
  • Dec, 2023 We released the open-source StripedHyena line of non-Transformer large language models! Outperforms most state-of-the-art Transformers with significant inference throughput improvements: code, HuggingFace, playground.

Research:
My research is at the intersection of machine learning, systems and signal processing:

I have also worked on neural differential equations, time series and dynamical systems. These days I am mostly interested in "full-stack" design of large deep learning models, from numerics, systems, training, all the way to finetuning and deployment.

Short bio:
I am a Staff Scientist at Together and a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stanford University. I am grateful to a long list of brilliant researchers and friends that have advised me through the years and (inexplicably) believe in my work: Stefano Ermon, Chris Ré, Eric Horvitz, Bryan Wilder, Seong Joon Oh, Animesh Garg, Ilija Ilievski, Jinkyoo Park, among others.
I am originally from Bologna, Italy, and I have had the wonderful opportunity to spend 5 fun years in Asia (China and South Korea). My Chinese name is 宁致远.