Baifeng Shi

BAIR Lab 2026 PhD Graduate Showcase: Placements at OpenAI, Physical Intelligence, Mistral, and Academia

Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab published its 2026 graduate showcase, highlighting PhD completions across LLMs, robotics, AI safety, computer vision, and human-AI interaction. Notable placements include a graduate joining OpenAI as Member of Technical Staff (LLM reasoning), one joining Physical Intelligence (generalist vision/robotics), one joining Mistral AI as AI Scientist, and one becoming an Assistant Professor at UCLA. The cohort's research themes span test-time vs. pretraining scaling tradeoffs, LLM fairness and calibration, dexterous manipulation, and generative modeling for proteins.