PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Isaac Ong

Isaac Ong is a researcher whose work connects distributed computing, language models, and AI security. He grew up in Singapore, moved to the Bay for college, and began research through projects at DSTA and SUTD. He coauthored Exoshuffle and Tensor Trust, and studied distributed language-model inference in a UC Berkeley master’s thesis. He coauthored Reka’s 2024 report on Core, Flash, and Edge, and co-led RouteLLM in 2025. As of October 2026, he is a programmer and researcher based in San Francisco.

Timeline

  1. 2014

    NLP research at DSTA

    In 2014, he works on NLP at Singapore’s Defence Science & Technology Agency and builds a web app that uses natural-language understanding to categorize and visualize search results.

  2. 2016

    Research at SUTD

    In 2016, he conducts computer science and biology research at the Singapore University of Technology & Design and builds an Android app that uses an athlete’s running pace to select music.

  3. 2023

    Exoshuffle at SIGCOMM

    At SIGCOMM in 2023, he coauthors Exoshuffle, a distributed systems paper that introduces a shuffle architecture built on Ray and distributed futures for data and machine-learning workloads.

  4. 2023–2024

    Tensor Trust prompt attacks

    With the Tensor Trust team, he coauthors an ICLR paper in 2024 about prompt injection attacks from an online game. Its 2023 preprint describes how the team gathers attacks and defenses and builds benchmarks for prompt extraction and hijacking.

  5. 2024

    Reka Core, Flash and Edge

    In 2024, he coauthors Reka’s technical report on Core, Flash, and Edge, a series of multimodal language models trained from scratch.

  6. 2024

    Berkeley master's thesis

    At UC Berkeley’s EECS Department, his 2024 master’s thesis studies dynamic partitioning for distributed LLM inference under adviser Ion Stoica. The evaluation reports up to 40% lower time to first token and up to 18% lower latency.

  7. 2025

    RouteLLM for model routing

    In 2025, he co-leads RouteLLM, a project that trains routers to choose between stronger and weaker language models using preference data. The ICLR 2025 paper reports cost reductions of more than two times without sacrificing response quality on public benchmarks.

  8. As of October 2026

    Programmer and researcher

    He grows up in Singapore and moves to the Bay for college. As of October 2026, he is a programmer and researcher based in San Francisco.

Career

  1. 2016Singapore University of Technology and Design
  2. 2014Defence Science & Technology Agency

Education

  1. 2024University of California, BerkeleyMaster's

From the biography.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Singapore University of Technology and Design. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Singapore University of Technology and Design. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of California, Berkeley. 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. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes University of California, Berkeley. 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.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Pursuits | Isaac Ong isaacong.me. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Isaac Ong isaacong.me. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Exoshuffle: An Extensible Shuffle Architecture arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Tensor Trust: Interpretable Prompt Injection Attacks from an Online Game arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Reka Core, Flash, and Edge: A Series of Powerful Multimodal Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Efficient Distributed LLM Inference with Dynamic Partitioning | EECS at UC Berkeley www2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. RouteLLM: Learning to Route LLMs from Preference Data | ML Anthology mlanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.