TIME100 AI 2026 · Thinkers
Chelsea Finn
Co-founder, Physical Intelligence
Her robot startup's model assembled and labeled 59 chocolate boxes without interruption; she says her co-founders talk to people while she talks to robots.
- Born
- 1992-10-08
- Now
- Co-founder, Physical Intelligence
- Studied
- UC Berkeley, MIT
Interesting facts
- Numbers
Her 2017 meta-learning paper, which helps neural networks learn new tasks from tiny datasets, has been cited more than 20,000 times.
time.com - First
Was the first woman to win the C.V. & Daulat Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award, in 2016, while still a PhD student.
en.wikipedia.org - Early start
Her PhD thesis, Learning to Learn with Gradients, won the 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
awards.acm.org - Side project
Has said she wants to build a robot that can make cereal.
imbue.com - In their words
On her role at Physical Intelligence: "The other co-founders talk to the people, and I talk to the robots."
time.com
Career
- Physical IntelligenceCo-founder2024 to now
- Stanford UniversityAssistant Professor2019 to now
- GoogleResearch Scientist, Google Brain2018–2024
Education
- PhD, Electrical engineering and computer science, UC Berkeley, 2018
- BS, Electrical engineering and computer science, MIT
