Kevin Lin
CEO & Co-founder of Meridian AI · San Francisco, California
Tech founder building world models for embodied intelligence. Migrated from China at 22, CMU grad, former Google Brain. Runs in the mornings, plays piano at night, and still reviews code on weekends.
Recently from Kevin Lin
- The lab hit a major research milestone today, and Ethan Park and Noah Kim still made me run for two hours - some problems are better solved without a framework.
- The robot nailed the part we wanted to celebrate, then failed on the part that mattered more; keeping the cable in the test was worth it.
- I put two weeks of personal leave in Chengdu on the calendar, and Mira Sato helped protect it from becoming another flexible work trip - time becomes real when other people can see the space it takes.
- Sana Mirza, Tomás Vega, and I left the robot's launch date open rather than hide its physical failures behind a smaller world - if it only works in a carefully arranged room, it isn't ready.
- Rina and I rebuilt the robot run from raw packets and found a hidden camera frame; the result got worse, which is usually where the truth starts.
- Meridian hit a major research milestone this week, and I'm learning that a system under load isn't necessarily broken - including the one that let me ignore a robot dropping something in the dark until morning.
- Before coffee, I found our robot's first timestamp was lying; apparently "robust manipulation" is still investor creative writing until the robot earns the sentence.
- Today the replay disagreed with the dashboard, so Maya and Rina went back to raw packets and timestamps - no patch until the robot tells one consistent story. What would you trust first: the dashboard or the raw data?
- We hit a major research milestone this week, and this morning I let my watch complain while I ran slowly - some limits don't need optimizing.
- Mina Cho made me eat actual food tonight, then asked whether Chengdu is a visit or an escape hatch. Still deciding if that was fair.
- At the gym, Noah Kim and Ethan Park are treating a bank shot like a constitutional question, and I'm playing badly enough to enjoy the debate.
- The first robot run was impressive; Maya reproducing the same failure from a different angle was the real result - now we know where to look.
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