PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ajay Jain

Ajay Jain is a generative-model researcher and co-founder of the video AI lab Genmo, known for diffusion-model work on images and 3D. After an S.B. in Computer Science at MIT, he coauthored Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models with Jonathan Ho and Pieter Abbeel in 2020, then DreamFusion with Ben Poole, Jonathan Barron and Ben Mildenhall in 2022, a paper that received an Outstanding Paper Award at ICLR 2023. In late 2022, he co-founded Genmo in San Francisco with Paras Jain, and in May 2023 he completed a Berkeley PhD under Pieter Abbeel with the thesis Transferable Generative Models. Genmo released the open-source Mochi 1 text-to-video model in October 2024. He is CTO and co-founder of Genmo, a research lab building models for video generation.

Now at
Genmo
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Links
Website, Google Scholar, X, LinkedIn and GitHub

Timeline

  1. By 2020

    S.B. in computer science at MIT

    He graduates from MIT with an S.B. in Computer Science, after research at CSAIL and the Media Lab. In June 2020, he coauthors Locally Masked Convolution for Autoregressive Models with Pieter Abbeel and Deepak Pathak, published at UAI 2020; its LMConv operation lets autoregressive image models generate pixels in arbitrary orders.

  2. June 2020

    Denoising diffusion probabilistic models

    In June 2020, he coauthors Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models with Jonathan Ho and Pieter Abbeel. The paper connects diffusion probabilistic models to denoising score matching with Langevin dynamics and reports a state-of-the-art FID score of 3.17 on unconditional CIFAR10.

  3. 2022

    Dream Fields and DreamFusion

    In March 2022, Dream Fields, written with Ben Mildenhall, Jon Barron, Pieter Abbeel and Ben Poole, is accepted to CVPR 2022; it combines neural rendering with image and text representations to synthesize 3D objects from natural language descriptions. In September 2022, he and Ben Poole, Jonathan Barron and Ben Mildenhall post DreamFusion, which optimizes a randomly initialized Neural Radiance Field with a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model and uses no 3D training data.

  4. 2022

    Co-founding Genmo

    He co-founds Genmo, an AI video generation research lab in San Francisco, with Paras Jain in late 2022. The company commits its first code on Christmas Day 2022.

  5. 2023

    An ICLR Outstanding Paper Award

    DreamFusion is one of four papers chosen for an Outstanding Paper Award at ICLR 2023. The paper shows how to generate 3D models from text without 3D models as training data.

  6. May 2023

    A Berkeley PhD under Abbeel

    He completes his PhD in the Berkeley EECS department in May 2023, with Pieter Abbeel as advisor. His thesis, Transferable Generative Models, covers autoregressive image models, text-to-3D synthesis with Score Distillation Sampling, and text-to-vector-graphics generation distilled from a pretrained diffusion model.

  7. October 2024

    Genmo releases Mochi 1

    In October 2024, Genmo, the company he co-founded, releases Mochi 1, an open-source text-to-video model with 10 billion parameters.

  8. As of October 2026

    CTO of Genmo

    He is CTO and co-founder of Genmo, a San Francisco research lab building models for video generation. In April 2025, he coauthors Analysis of Attention in Video Diffusion Transformers with Yuxin Wen, Jim Wu, Tom Goldstein and Ashwinee Panda, which identifies three properties of attention in these models: structure, sparsity and sinks.

Career

  1. Since 2022GenmoCo-founder, CTO
  2. Until 2020MIT CSAILResearcher
  3. Until 2020Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyResearcher

Education

  1. 2023University of California, BerkeleyPhD
  2. 2020Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyS.B. in Computer Science

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Ajay Jain. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Ajay Jain. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Ajay Jain yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Ajay Jain ajayj.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. [2006.12486] Locally Masked Convolution for Autoregressive Models arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. [2006.11239] Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. [2209.14988] DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion dreamfusion3d.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Mochi-1 Review (Genmo): The Open-Source Video Model That Pioneered 10B-Scale Weights — ChatForest chatforest.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Group - Pieter Abbeel (UC Berkeley) people.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Ajay Jain | Open Data Science Conference staging6.odsc.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Announcing the ICLR 2023 Outstanding Paper Award Recipients – ICLR Blog blog.iclr.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Transferable Generative Models | EECS at UC Berkeley www2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. [2504.10317] Analysis of Attention in Video Diffusion Transformers arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.