Archive · 1 Dec 2025
Gen Z Founders Reject Musk's Offer, AI Model Outperforms OpenAI
Two 22-year-old friends from Michigan, William Chen and Guan Wang, turned down a huge offer from Elon Musk to work on their own AI project.
They started a company called Sapient Intelligence and created a new AI model called the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM).
This model is special because it can solve complex problems like advanced Sudoku and mazes better than other big AI systems.
The model has only 27 million parts, but it can think more deeply and make fewer mistakes.
Chen and Wang believe that one day, AI will be smarter than humans, and they want to be the first to make that happen.
They plan to open an office in the US soon.
William Chen and Guan Wang, co-founders of Sapient Intelligence, rejected a multimillion-dollar offer from Elon Musk to pursue their own AI project.
Their Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) outperforms major AI systems on tasks measuring abstract reasoning, such as advanced Sudoku and maze-solving.
HRM has only 27 million parameters but demonstrates significant reasoning depth and reduced hallucination compared to conventional LLMs.
The model excels in areas like weather prediction, quantitative trading, and medical monitoring, matching state-of-the-art performance.
Sapient Intelligence plans to open a US office soon to expand their operations.
- Who
- William Chen and Guan Wang, co-founders of Sapient Intelligence
- What
- Rejected Elon Musk's multimillion-dollar offer to pursue their own AI project, Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM)
- When
- Breakthrough in June
- Where
- Originally from Michigan, currently based in Beijing
- Why
- To create an AI that can solve any problem and overcome the limitations of large-language models
- Founders
- William Chen and Guan Wang
- Company
- Sapient Intelligence
- AI Model
- Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM)
- Parameters
- 27 million
- Performance
- Outperforms OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek on complex tasks
- Tasks
- Advanced Sudoku, maze-solving, ARC-AGI benchmark
- Future Plans
- Opening a US office
Sources
Gen Z Students Reject Elon Musk's Offer, Their AI Model Outperforms OpenAI
Meet William Chen and Guan Wang: Two Gen Z founders who rejected Elon Musk’s offer to build OpenAI-beating HRM AI
