# Giovanni D'Antonio

![Giovanni D'Antonio](/resources/cognition/portraits/giovanni-d-antonio.webp)

Building Cognition; prev. thinky, deepmind, harvard, 2x phio gold  
Cognition  
San Francisco Bay Area

## At Cognition

- Role: Research Team + Office of the President (Leadership)
- Joined: Oct 2026
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: 😇, Sequoia Capital
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Citadel (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio
- X: @regulargio
- GitHub: https://github.com/GiovanniDantonio
- Website: https://www.giovannidantonio.com
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- Joined Cognition in Oct 2026 on the 'Research Team + Office of the President' per his LinkedIn experience entry; Cosign lists him as Researcher at Cognition from Sep 2026, so the role reads as research plus chief-of-staff-style work rather than a pure Devin/Windsurf product-engineering seat. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Shared Cognition's announcement of raising over $2B at a $48B valuation with the comment "do it all" on 2026-09-08, around the time he joined. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/giovanni-dantonio_cognition-has-raised-over-2b-at-a-48b-valuation-activity-7503180252760768512-1umw)
- Sequoia Capital scout since Jan 2026; LinkedIn lists Sable, Sail Research, Universal Constructor, Intelligence.ai, MIRA, Tzafon, CompLabs, Pantheon and Creatorwood among companies. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Member of Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab Dec 2025-Oct 2026; his description: "Trying to connect research <> product, promo in 3mo; Cooking on evals, RL, and a very, very cool product." (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Summer 2025 Member of Technical Staff at Google DeepMind on the Gemini Core Model Team, Frontier Evals. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Did engineering at a stealth startup Jun-Dec 2024 building around AI agents, digital twins and cyberattacks; he states the company was acquired by depthfirst.com (not by Cognition). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Open source: GitHub GiovanniDantonio (blog field giovannidantonio.com); his site lists 0PenAI (Zero Pen AI, camel_hack repo, 2025), eXpect: Predict the Truth (with repo under raghavpillai/eXpect, 2024), and a centralized Tor-inspired relay network with layered encryption (2024). (https://www.giovannidantonio.com/coding)
- Researcher at Harvard's Kempner Institute for AI 2024-2026: game theory and reinforcement learning in 2024, AI evaluations and benchmark manipulation in 2025; also a Teaching Fellow. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Public headline says "Building Cognition; prev. thinky, deepmind, harvard, 2x phio gold". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Writes long-form essays at giovannidantonio.com, including 'The science of benchmarking: from Zero to Hero [Part I]' (2026-08-12) and 'How to actually learn' (2026-02-18). (https://www.giovannidantonio.com)
- Giovanni D'Antonio is a coauthor of the paper 'SimpleQA Verified: A Reliable Factuality Benchmark to Measure Parametric Knowledge' with Lukas Haas, Gal Yona, Sasha Goldshtein and Dipanjan Das, published as a Tech Report in 2025. (https://galyona.github.io/)
- VC exposure 2024-2025: Bain Capital Ventures winter internship and Emergence Capital investment team (Spring 2025), per his LinkedIn stealth-startup entry. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Giovanni D'Antonio planned to leave for the United States in August 2022 to pursue two degree courses, Computer Engineering and Business, in four years. (https://www.ilmediano.com/giovanni-orgoglio-di-somma-dalle-olimpiadi-di-filosofia-alle-piu-importanti-universita-americane/)
- Giovanni D'Antonio was to deliver a Lectio Magistralis on 'hope' before President Sergio Mattarella on 9 April 2022 at the inaugural day of Procida Italian Capital of Culture. (https://www.ilmediano.com/giovanni-orgoglio-di-somma-dalle-olimpiadi-di-filosofia-alle-piu-importanti-universita-americane/)
- Giovanni D'Antonio was to give a lectio magistralis on hope before President Sergio Mattarella on the opening day of Procida Capitale della Cultura 2022 on the Friday following the article. (https://napoli.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/22_aprile_06/giovanni-d-antonio-18enne-campione-filosofia-conteso-tre-migliori-universita-americane-4654e620-b5d3-11ec-a5bb-947bbaae054b.shtml)
- Giovanni D'Antonio was admitted to 11 US universities. (https://napoli.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/22_aprile_06/giovanni-d-antonio-18enne-campione-filosofia-conteso-tre-migliori-universita-americane-4654e620-b5d3-11ec-a5bb-947bbaae054b.shtml)
- Giovanni D'Antonio was one of 200 foreign students admitted worldwide out of 80,000 candidates. (https://napoli.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/22_aprile_06/giovanni-d-antonio-18enne-campione-filosofia-conteso-tre-migliori-universita-americane-4654e620-b5d3-11ec-a5bb-947bbaae054b.shtml)
- Giovanni D'Antonio was admitted to all 11 of the top US universities he applied to, winning a scholarship at each. (https://www.ilmediano.com/giovanni-orgoglio-di-somma-dalle-olimpiadi-di-filosofia-alle-piu-importanti-universita-americane/)
- Giovanni D'Antonio said he was the first Italian in history to be admitted to all three of the world's top universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton). (https://www.ilmediano.com/giovanni-orgoglio-di-somma-dalle-olimpiadi-di-filosofia-alle-piu-importanti-universita-americane/)
- Giovanni D'Antonio had recently participated in the delivery of medicines sent to Ukraine in the days before April 2022. (https://www.ilmediano.com/giovanni-orgoglio-di-somma-dalle-olimpiadi-di-filosofia-alle-piu-importanti-universita-americane/)
- Giovanni D'Antonio won the gold medal at the Philosophy Olympiad in the English language in 2021. (https://napoli.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/22_aprile_06/giovanni-d-antonio-18enne-campione-filosofia-conteso-tre-migliori-universita-americane-4654e620-b5d3-11ec-a5bb-947bbaae054b.shtml)
- Giovanni D'Antonio placed among the top four students in the world Philosophy Olympiad competition, surpassed only by a Chinese, a Japanese, and a Slovenian student. (https://napoli.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/22_aprile_06/giovanni-d-antonio-18enne-campione-filosofia-conteso-tre-migliori-universita-americane-4654e620-b5d3-11ec-a5bb-947bbaae054b.shtml)
- Giovanni D'Antonio won the Olimpiadi della Filosofia (Philosophy Olympiad) in the year before April 2022. (https://www.ilmediano.com/giovanni-orgoglio-di-somma-dalle-olimpiadi-di-filosofia-alle-piu-importanti-universita-americane/)
- Giovanni D'Antonio placed in the top 4 in the world at the Philosophy World Championships after winning the Italian Philosophy Olympiad. (https://www.ilmediano.com/giovanni-orgoglio-di-somma-dalle-olimpiadi-di-filosofia-alle-piu-importanti-universita-americane/)

Thinky Machines, former DeepMind, Harvard, and 2x Philosophy Gold Medalist. 2x Top 61 student in Italy.

From a small village in Italy, adopted by Silicon Valley; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Giovanni D'Antonio taught himself English at seventeen. (https://www.giovannidantonio.com/blog/bitter-lesson-young-career)
- Giovanni D'Antonio learned about the Common App during breaks at his job while applying to U.S. colleges. (https://www.giovannidantonio.com/blog/bitter-lesson-young-career)
- Giovanni D'Antonio wrote that he is about to graduate from Harvard. (https://www.giovannidantonio.com/blog/bitter-lesson-young-career)
- Giovanni D'Antonio wrote that he knows VCs and goes to fancy dinners. (https://www.giovannidantonio.com/blog/bitter-lesson-young-career)
- Giovanni D'Antonio authored a three-part blog series on the science of benchmarking, with Part I explaining benchmarking from first principles. (https://www.giovannidantonio.com/blog/science-of-benchmarking-part-1)
- Giovanni D'Antonio wrote that Part II of his benchmarking series will cover ways benchmarks fail, including stronger statistics, noisy data, unreliable graders, contamination, repeated trials, leaderboard gaming, and tricks to have pretty scores for investors. (https://www.giovannidantonio.com/blog/science-of-benchmarking-part-1)
- Giovanni D'Antonio wrote that Part III of his benchmarking series will cover live and dynamic benchmarks, arenas, production evals, agent trajectories, adaptive testing, and open problems teams at places like Arena, Braintrust, and Intelligence.ai are trying to solve. (https://www.giovannidantonio.com/blog/science-of-benchmarking-part-1)
- Giovanni D'Antonio works across research and product at Cognition. (https://cosign.co/profile/nominee/k57cmptyx60xstg1h9njbzngy98e725n)
- Giovanni D'Antonio previously built AI evaluations and reinforcement-learning products at Thinking Machines Lab. (https://cosign.co/profile/nominee/k57cmptyx60xstg1h9njbzngy98e725n)
- Giovanni D'Antonio worked on Gemini frontier evaluations at Google DeepMind. (https://cosign.co/profile/nominee/k57cmptyx60xstg1h9njbzngy98e725n)
- Giovanni D'Antonio authored a blog post titled 'The Science of Benchmarking, Part 1' on giovannidantonio.com, described as a first-principles guide to evaluating AI systems covering construct validity, sampling uncertainty and reproducible measurement. (https://cosign.co/profile/nominee/k57cmptyx60xstg1h9njbzngy98e725n)
- Attended the Citadel Securities Quant Invitational (Quant Research) in Jan 2024; ML Engineer at Satispay (Jun-Aug 2023); taught a semester ML fellowship for the Harvard Undergraduate Machine Intelligence Community (Aug-Nov 2024). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Previous roles include Member of Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab; Researcher & Teaching Fellow at Harvard University; Member of Technical Staff at Google DeepMind; Learning about the Business Side of Startups at Stealth Startup; Engineering at Stealth Startup; Machine Learning Lecturer at Harvard Undergraduate Machine Intelligence Community; Quant Invitational (Quant Research) at Citadel Securities; Director of Sponsorships at Behavioral Strategy Group. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)
- Ran 70 marathons in 2025, per a 2026-02-02 LinkedIn post framing it as consistency over talent. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/giovanni-dantonio_i-finished-70-marathons-in-2025-i-am-a-big-activity-7424133755440869376-mb8k)
- Location is San Francisco Bay Area. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio)

## Experience
- - at Cognition (Oct 2026 - Present): Research Team + Office of the President
- 😇 at Sequoia Capital (Jan 2026 - Present): Helping people hire, sell, and change the world. Current sequoia scout.
Companies: Sable, Sail Research, Universal Constructor, Intelligence.ai, MIRA, Tzafon, CompLabs, Pantheon, Creatorwood [...]
- Member of Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab - San Francisco, California, United States (Dec 2025 - Oct 2026): Trying to connect research <> product, promo in 3mo; Cooking on evals, RL, and a very, very cool product.
- Researcher & Teaching Fellow at Harvard University - Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (Jan 2024 - Jan 2026): Researcher at the Kempner Institute for AI (Selection of papers in the "Projects" section)
- 2024: Focus on Game Theory & Reinforcement Learning
- 2025: Focus on AI Evaluations & Benchmark Manipulation
Teaching Fellow
- Spring 25: ES 94 with Prof. Josh Lerner - Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Case Study Perspectives
- Fall 25: ES 30 with Prof. Spencer Rascoff (Co-Founder Zillow) - Startups: From Idea to Exit
- Member of Technical Staff at Google DeepMind - Mountain View, California, United States (May 2025 - Aug 2025): Gemini Core Model Team, Frontier Evals
- Learning about the Business Side of Startups at Stealth Startup (Sep 2024 - May 2025): My main goal is to learn from both failures and successes to build something people really care about. 
- Bain Capital Ventures (BCV): Winter internship 
- Emergence Capital: Investment Team (Spring '25)
- Human Capital: Investment Team (Fall '24)
- Engineering at Stealth Startup - New York, NY (Jun 2024 - Dec 2024): Built a lot around AI Agents, Digital Twins, Cyberattacks, loved every moment of it, learned a ton. Company got acquired by depthfirst.com
Check out at https://www.giovannidantonio.com/coding
- Machine Learning Lecturer at Harvard Undergraduate Machine Intelligence Community - Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (Aug 2024 - Nov 2024): Taught a full semester fellowship centered on Machine Learning to Harvard Students

Topics Covered: Neural Networks
CNNs + Computer Vision
RAG + Prompt Engineering
Transformers + Text Generation
Diffusion + MultiModal Generation
RL
- Quant Invitational (Quant Research) at Citadel Securities - Miami, Florida, Stati Uniti d'America (Jan 2024 - Jan 2024): Amazing experience, met a lot of smart people, understood that finance + machine learning can be interesting.
- Director of Sponsorships at Behavioral Strategy Group - Cambridge, Massachusetts, Stati Uniti d'America (Jan 2023 - Jan 2024)
- Consultant and Researcher at Behavioral Strategy Group - Cambridge, Massachusetts, Stati Uniti d'America (Aug 2022 - Jan 2023): • Conducted research on consumer spending behaviors in different industries
• Created a model to predict consumer spending in times of crisis 
• Helped companies better understand the consumer market for their products through deliverables
- Machine Learning Engineer at Satispay - Milan (Jun 2023 - Aug 2023)
- GM at Self Employed - Somma Vesuviana (Feb 2020 - Jun 2022): - Lots of websites, apps, plugins, some of them scaled to a lot of people and got sold ;)

## Education
- Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences - Master of Science - MS, Computer Science: Concurrent with my Bachelor, took more courses than expected because education is fun
- Harvard University - Bachelor of Arts - BA, Computer Science || Honors Degree
- Harvard Business School - Roberts Family Fellow: Cross Register: To address complex modern challenges, leaders need innovation, problem-solving, and interdisciplinary skills. The Harvard Undergraduate Technology Innovation Fellows (HUTIF) Program, a collaboration by FAS, SEAS, and HBS, develops this new generation of tech entrepreneurs. Funded by the Roberts Family Foundation, the program selects 10-15 students (Roberts Family Fellows) from any concentration, helping them build the knowledge, skills, and community to launch and lead innovative endeavors.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Course 6: Cross Register

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio
- https://www.giovannidantonio.com
- https://www.giovannidantonio.com/coding
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovanni-dantonio?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAADGE-AoBWopX8Yz0_gxbsPDk1rMk6Mx37ZE
- https://napoli.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/22_aprile_06/giovanni-d-antonio-18enne-campione-filosofia-conteso-tre-migliori-universita-americane-4654e620-b5d3-11ec-a5bb-947bbaae054b.shtml
- https://www.ilmediano.com/giovanni-orgoglio-di-somma-dalle-olimpiadi-di-filosofia-alle-piu-importanti-universita-americane/
- https://www.giovannidantonio.com/blog/bitter-lesson-young-career
- https://www.giovannidantonio.com/blog/science-of-benchmarking-part-1
- https://galyona.github.io/
- https://cosign.co/profile/nominee/k57cmptyx60xstg1h9njbzngy98e725n
- https://github.com/GiovanniDantonio
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/giovanni-dantonio_what-if-your-ai-budget-went-to-the-engineers-activity-7517994151037190144-ySb3
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/giovanni-dantonio_cognition-has-raised-over-2b-at-a-48b-valuation-activity-7503180252760768512-1umw
- https://www.raiplay.it/video/2022/05/Un-diciottenne-da-Somma-Vesuviana-ad-Harvard---Geo-25052022-3af13b47-272b-43d9-aca6-f63156ee4bf3.html
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/giovanni-dantonio_i-finished-70-marathons-in-2025-i-am-a-big-activity-7424133755440869376-mb8k


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/giovanni-d-antonio · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people