Toby Pohlen

Timeline

1. 2016–2017

   Full-resolution residual networks

   The paper appears on arXiv in November 2016 and becomes an oral at CVPR in 2017. With Alexander Hermans, Markus Mathias and Bastian Leibe, he builds a full-resolution network that reaches 71.8% intersection-over-union on Cityscapes without pre-training; he hosts the FRRN code on GitHub.

2. 2018

   Observe and Look Further

   In May 2018, Tobias Pohlen is the first author of Observe and Look Further, joined by 12 co-authors including Bilal Piot, Todd Hester and Rémi Munos. The algorithm uses human demonstrations to guide exploration, exceeds an average human’s score on 40 of 42 Atari games, and solves the first level of Montezuma’s Revenge, the first deep RL algorithm to do so.

3. 2019

   AlphaStar in Nature

   Nature publishes Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning in 2019, with Pohlen among DeepMind’s authors in London. AlphaStar reaches Grandmaster level for all three StarCraft races and ranks above 99.8% of officially ranked human players.

4. 2022

   Learning to control computers

   In 2022, Pohlen coauthors A data-driven approach for learning to control computers, which trains agents to use keyboard and mouse with natural-language goals and reports human-level mean performance across MiniWob++ tasks.

5. By 2023

   Staff research engineer

   By November 2023, he has spent more than six years at Google DeepMind, most recently as a staff research engineer.

6. March 2023–November 2023

   xAI’s founding team and Grok

   Elon Musk founds xAI in March 2023 with Pohlen among its founding researchers. In July 2023, the company unveils its founding team, whose members include former researchers and engineers from Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft and Tesla, plus a University of Toronto professor. In November 2023, Pohlen describes a 36-hour push that ships the first Grok model from a partially fine-tuned base model and a basic UI.

7. February 2026

   Leading Macrohard

   Macrohard aims to create an agent that can do anything a white-collar worker can do on a computer. In February 2026, xAI chooses Pohlen to lead the project.

8. February 2026

   Leaving xAI

   In February 2026, he leaves xAI as its seventh co-founder to depart since 2023. He says his next priorities are sleep, writing down what he has learned, and deciding what to do next; he names no new role.