This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with William Chen, the 26-year-old cofounder of Sapient Intelligence, a Singapore-based AI lab building AGI. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I grew up in Shenzhen, China, a very modern city.
I moved to Michigan for high school, where I worked on a lot of robotics-related projects. I’d always dreamt about becoming an inventor when I was a kid, and have always been very interested in designing stuff.
I met my cofounder, Guan Wang, in high school. We worked on a lot of projects together related to robotics and autonomous driving, and we were getting increasingly interested in AI before college.
When it came time to apply to college, I received offers from schools in the US, such as Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon, as well as Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Why I chose China for college
China has a reputation for being hyper-focused on grades and tests. Chinese students get into college through the competitive Gao Kao college entrance exam, which gives them the momentum to keep pushing academically.
I was less concerned about grades, as I wanted to build a startup. So, that made me concerned about whether college in China would be a good idea.
Before accepting the offer, I went to scout Tsinghua and knocked on the doors of several professors there.
We talked about doing research together, and to my surprise, it was not what I originally assumed it would be like. It was very open, and they had great infrastructure there to support student entrepreneurs.
The university also offered me a scholarship. So, taking it all into consideration, I chose Tsinghua University to study mechanical engineering, along with Guan.
How I kept one foot in the US
But I didn’t want to be detached from the tech scene in the US. My answer to this was to tap my high school friends in the US.
In 2019, I took a 20-day trip during my winter break to the US, shadowing my high school friends who were attending colleges across the country, from east to west. I stayed with each friend for two to three days, literally sleeping in their dorm room if it was a guy, or in a nearby hotel if it was a girl.
I started at MIT, then drove to Columbia University in New York, then to Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pennsylvania, and finally the University of Michigan. Then I took a flight to the West Coast to visit USC, UCLA, Stanford, and Berkeley.
I attended their classes with them, learned about their clubs, and learned how they do research. I not only caught up with my friends but also met some of their professors and chatted about life and the future of robotics.
It helped me to vibe check and see, “Hey, is there anything they’re doing differently?”
Now, some of my friends are startup founders too, and I have connections all over the place. We still have a very tight relationship.
Building Sapient
After graduating from Tsinghua University, Guan and I founded Sapient Intelligence, an artificial general intelligence lab, in Singapore in 2024.
We’re building latent-space AI models that can solve complex problems much faster than existing AI models, and which are more cost-efficient. Our latest product, Praxist, is an autonomous research tool that helps companies accelerate their research.
We’re a team of 50 people now, spread across Singapore, Beijing, and Palo Alto.
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