PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Hieu Pham

Also known as Pham Hy Hieu, Phạm Hy Hiếu

Hieu Pham is a machine learning researcher whose papers cover attention-based machine translation, automated neural architecture design and large-scale vision models. He earned a computer science degree with honors at Stanford in 2015, completed a PhD with Google Brain and Carnegie Mellon University in 2021, and coauthored Efficient Neural Architecture Search in 2018 and Meta Pseudo Labels in 2020. After working as a research scientist at Google Brain until 2023, he joined xAI in 2024 and OpenAI in 2025. His 2015 paper with Thang Luong and Christopher Manning on attention-based neural machine translation won the ACL 2025 Test-of-Time Paper Award. He left OpenAI in February 2026 and is building something new in Vietnam.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2011–2015

    Computer science at Stanford

    He earns a BS in computer science with honors at Stanford University, studying there from 2011 to 2015.

  2. 2017–2021

    PhD at Carnegie Mellon

    He completes a PhD in machine learning and computational linguistics with Google Brain and Carnegie Mellon University between 2017 and 2021.

  3. 2018

    Efficient Neural Architecture Search

    In 2018, he is first author of Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Parameter Sharing, written with Melody Y. Guan, Barret Zoph, Quoc V. Le and Jeff Dean. The ENAS method finds network designs by sharing parameters between child models, which makes it 1000x less expensive than standard Neural Architecture Search.

  4. 2020–2023

    Research scientist at Google Brain

    From 2020 to 2023, he is a research scientist at Google Brain. In 2020, he coauthors Meta Pseudo Labels with Zihang Dai, Qizhe Xie, Minh-Thang Luong and Quoc V. Le, a semi-supervised method that reaches 90.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. In 2021, he is first author of BASIC, a combined scaling method that reaches 85.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet without any labeled ImageNet example.

  5. 2024–2025

    Working on Grok-3 at xAI

    He joins xAI as a member of technical staff in August 2024. He works on development of the Grok-3 model and on managing power fluctuations in the Colossus supercomputer system.

  6. 2025

    ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award

    He and his coauthors Thang Luong and Christopher D. Manning win the ACL 2025 Test-of-Time Paper Award for their 2015 EMNLP paper Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation.

  7. August 2025–February 2026

    Member of technical staff at OpenAI

    He moves from xAI to OpenAI in August 2025 as a member of technical staff. In February 2026, he announces his departure from OpenAI, citing burnout, and says he will return to Vietnam with his family.

  8. As of October 2026

    Building something new in Vietnam

    He is building something new in Vietnam, his home country, after leaving OpenAI in February 2026.

Career

  1. 2025–2026OpenAIMember of Technical Staff
  2. 2024–2025xAIMember of Technical Staff
  3. 2020–2023Google BrainResearch Scientist

Education

  1. 2021Carnegie Mellon UniversityPhD
  2. 2021Google BrainPhD
  3. 2015Stanford UniversityBS

From the biography.

  1. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Hieu Pham. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  2. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Hieu Pham. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  3. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Hieu Pham. Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. 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 Hieu Pham yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Hieu Pham hyhieu.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Vietnamese AI researcher Pham Hy Hieu leaves OpenAI citing burnout news.tuoitre.vn. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Parameter Sharing arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Meta Pseudo Labels arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Combined Scaling for Zero-shot Transfer Learning arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. A former OpenAI and xAI staffer says he burned out in AI labs, so he's quitting and going back to Vietnam tech.yahoo.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. ACL Test-of-Time Papers Award Recipients - Admin Wiki aclweb.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.