PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Zhongkai Zhu

Zhongkai Zhu is an AI researcher whose work spans protein structure prediction, multimodal language models and audio generation. He studied at Beihang University from 2003 to 2007 and attended RWTH Aachen University as an MS student from 2007 to 2010. Before joining Reka AI, he worked at Meta AI, Microsoft and Tesla; he coauthored the ESMFold Science paper in 2023. In 2024, he coauthored a technical report on Reka Core, Flash and Edge and the Vibe-Eval benchmark. He coauthored WavJourney in 2023; the paper appeared in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing in 2025, and he was listed as a Reka AI-affiliated coauthor for the Sound Generation and Synthesis poster session at ICASSP in May 2026.

Now at
Reka AI
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Timeline

  1. 2003–2007

    Undergraduate study at Beihang

    He studies at Beihang University from 2003 to 2007.

  2. 2007–2010

    MS study at RWTH Aachen

    From 2007 to 2010, he studies for an MS at RWTH Aachen University.

  3. 2023

    ESMFold for protein structure

    In 2023, he coauthors the Science paper on evolutionary-scale prediction of atomic-level protein structure with a language model. ESMFold uses ESM-2 to predict protein structures directly from sequence.

  4. February 2024

    Reka Flash and Edge

    In February 2024, he appears among the Reka team as the company introduces Flash, a multimodal language model, and its compact Edge variant.

  5. By April 2024

    Work before Reka AI

    Before joining Reka AI, he works at Meta AI, Microsoft and Tesla. By April 2024, he is part of Reka’s team.

  6. April 2024

    Reka’s multimodal model report

    In April 2024, he coauthors a report introducing Reka Core, Flash and Edge, multimodal models trained from scratch to process text, images, video and audio.

  7. 2024

    Vibe-Eval benchmark

    In 2024, he coauthors Vibe-Eval, a hard evaluation suite for measuring progress on multimodal language models.

  8. May 2026

    WavJourney at ICASSP

    In 2023, he coauthors WavJourney, a framework that uses large language models to connect audio models and create storytelling audio from text. The paper appears in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing in 2025. At ICASSP in May 2026, he is listed as a Reka AI-affiliated WavJourney coauthor in the Sound Generation and Synthesis poster session.

Career

  1. NowReka AI
  2. Until 2024Meta
  3. Until 2024Microsoft
  4. Until 2024Tesla

Education

  1. 2010RWTH Aachen UniversityMS
  2. 2007Beihang University

From the biography.

  1. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Zhongkai Zhu. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  2. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Reka AI. 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.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Reka AI. 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.
  4. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Reka AI. 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.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Zhongkai Zhu — Lacuna lacuna.tiptreesystems.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. GitHub - facebookresearch/esm: Evolutionary Scale Modeling (esm): Pretrained language models for proteins github.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Reka Flash: Efficient and Capable Multimodal Language Models reka.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. 谷歌Meta离职团队4个月训出比肩GPT-4大模型，清华北航校友参与-36氪 36kr.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. [2404.12387] Reka Core, Flash, and Edge: A Series of Powerful Multimodal Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. GitHub - reka-ai/reka-vibe-eval: Multimodal language model benchmark, featuring challenging examples github.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. [2307.14335] WavJourney: Compositional Audio Creation with Large Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. IEEE ICASSP 2026 || Barcelona, Spain || 4-8 May 2026 cmsworkshops.com. Checked 21 October 2026.