PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Rewon Child

Also known as 石井興元

Rewon Child is a researcher whose work spans sparse transformers, generative pretraining, and few-shot language models. At Yale he applied computational methods and natural language processing to politics and government. He then applied deep learning to medical imaging at Enlitic and worked on speech recognition at Baidu Research. At OpenAI he helped develop the Sparse Transformer, and he coauthored Language Models are Few-Shot Learners, which NeurIPS named an Outstanding Paper in 2020. He was on Inflection AI's founding team from 2022 to 2024, and he now works at Microsoft AI.

Timeline

  1. 2013

    Computational politics at Yale

    He is in Yale's class of 2013, where he focuses on computational methods and natural language processing for politics and government.

  2. 2015–2017

    Deep learning at Enlitic and Baidu

    From 2015 to 2016 he applies deep learning to medical imaging at Enlitic. From 2016 to 2017 he works as a researcher on speech recognition at Baidu Research.

  3. 2019

    The Sparse Transformer at OpenAI

    At OpenAI he develops the Sparse Transformer with collaborators, and the paper is submitted to arXiv in April 2019.

  4. 2020

    A NeurIPS Outstanding Paper

    Language Models are Few-Shot Learners, which he coauthors, wins an Outstanding Paper award at NeurIPS in 2020.

  5. 2020

    An ICML honorable mention

    Generative Pretraining From Pixels, with his coauthors, receives an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention at ICML 2020.

  6. 2021–2022

    Large-model research at Google

    From 2021 to 2022 he does research on large models at Google Brain and Search. He is one of the authors of PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways.

  7. 2022–2024

    Inflection AI's founding team

    He works on the founding team at Inflection AI from 2022 to 2024.

  8. Since 2024

    Working at Microsoft AI

    He works at Microsoft AI, the division that Microsoft forms when it hires the Inflection founding team.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Speaker Lunch: A conversation on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and building start-ups | Yale School of Management som.yale.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Rewon Child rewonc.github.io. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. [1904.10509] Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. [2005.14165] Language Models are Few-Shot Learners arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. NeurIPS 2020 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. ICML 2020 Awards icml.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. [2204.02311] PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.