Stay close to reality.
Experts, raw data, and edge cases come first.
Kaiyu Zhang
New writingBook essay · The Human Condition
After Labor Disappears, Will We Be Free?
A language-model researcher rereads Hannah Arendt on labor, making, action—and what freedom might require in the age of AI.
I’m Kaiyu. My work sits between machine intelligence and the older mysteries of being human: perception, creativity, philosophy, and life itself.
I build multimodal agents, explore biological discovery, and follow questions across history, science, and philosophy—often through conversations with people who see the world differently.
Outside research, I’m usually reading my way through history, philosophy, sociology, or psychology; watching films and then disappearing down a rabbit hole of how they were made; or staying active through climbing, basketball, soccer, and tennis. I also watch Huberman Lab with the optimistic belief that one more episode might finally make me healthier. At home, life is supervised by three very fluffy companions: a husky, a border collie, and a ragdoll cat—an energetic, opinionated little committee that keeps me grounded.
- History
- Creativity
- Biology
- Philosophy
Folio I · How I think
How I think
Build to understand.
Making exposes what theory leaves vague.
Keep ideas revisable.
Evidence—and other disciplines—should change the map.
Folio II · Research agenda
Questions I keep returning to
Not a fixed program—an evolving set of problems worth thinking about across disciplines.
Can we teach creativity to AI?
Beyond imitation: can a system develop taste, critique its own work, and make coherent surprises?
Can AI accelerate our understanding of life?
How might it connect biological structure, function, and evolution without flattening living complexity?
Can AI understand—or create—philosophy?
What evidence would show genuine understanding, and what would make a philosophical idea truly new?
Folio III · Selected work
Building multimodal agents
Selected chapters of my recent work, described only at the level of publicly released systems.
October 2026 · Computer-use post-training & launch
Muse Wonder
I contributed to computer-use post-training and built two of the six official release demos.
Meta introduced Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full as frontier models for personal and professional agents, including browser and cross-app workflows.
2026 · Computer use × visual storytelling
Muse Spark 1.1 & 1.2
My focus is post-training and evaluation for multimodal agents that perceive evolving visual context, work through software tools, and create coherent artifacts over long horizons.
The public releases describe computer use, cross-app workflows, and longer-horizon agentic work; Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang also outlined how the system delegates, scripts, and acts through interfaces.
2025 · Multimodal pretraining
Muse Spark 1.0
My focus was multimodal STEM reasoning and visual grounding, working across data, evaluation, and training science.
Meta introduced Muse Spark as a natively multimodal model for reasoning, tool use, and visual chain-of-thought.
This work was deeply collaborative. I’m especially grateful to the talented leads who shaped my early career—including Xia Fei, Tao Yu, Zhiqing Sun, and Jiahui Yu—my manager Guan Pang, and the many colleagues whose judgment, rigor, and generosity made the work possible.
Folio IV · PhD chapter
A biomedical AI research flywheel
During my PhD at the University of Washington, I worked with radiologists to connect clinically meaningful questions, expert knowledge, machine learning, and new observations of cerebrovascular structure and function.
- 01Clinical question
- 02Expert-facing tool
- 03Structured data
- 04Model
- 05Biological insight
- 06Better next question
Folio V · Books, films & writing
Read, watched & written
A living record of recent books, a personal film top ten, and longer essays that begin in their margins.
Recently read
Books on my desk
Eight books I have recently read or returned to, kept here as one bilingual shelf.
How to Profit by One’s Enemies — Selected Essays from the Moralia
如何从敌人身上获益
A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains
智能简史：进化、AI 与人脑的突破
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A personal top ten
Films I return to
Ten films that have stayed with me after the credits, ordered as a personal top ten.
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Longer pieces live in their own rooms, so this homepage can stay a map rather than become an archive.