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Sai Charitha Akula’s Journey From Quantitative Finance to AI
Sai Charitha Akula is a researcher who works on making computers better at understanding pictures and videos.
She studied computer science at IIT Bombay and New York University.
She first worked in finance at Goldman Sachs and helped build tools that made trading and pricing faster.
Later, she chose to focus on artificial intelligence.
Her research was presented at a major AI conference called NeurIPS in 2024.
At another firm, Millennium, she helped build AI tools that employees used to find information in many documents.
She then joined Meta and worked on AI that can understand words, pictures, and video.
She later moved to a team working on wearable AI, including research connected to Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
She says she wants AI to be useful, accurate, safe, and trustworthy.
Sai Charitha Akula earned a computer science degree with honours from IIT Bombay and a master’s degree with a 4.0 GPA from New York University.
After rising to vice president at Goldman Sachs, she led work on trading systems that helped triple trade volume and made firm-wide pricing ten times faster.
Her multimodal AI research was selected for an oral presentation at NeurIPS 2024 and later exceeded 1,000 citations and 2,000 GitHub stars.
She joined Millennium’s Core AI team, where systems she built for searching and reasoning over financial documents were used by more than half of employees.
At Meta, she worked on Llama’s multimodal capabilities and later moved to Reality Labs, with work connected to Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
- Who
- Sai Charitha Akula, an AI researcher originally from Anantapur.
- What
- Her career spans quantitative finance, multimodal AI research, and work on wearable AI.
- Where
- She studied at IIT Bombay and New York University and has worked in Bengaluru, New York, and at Meta.
- When
- Her academic and professional achievements include NeurIPS 2024 and a 2024 NYU master’s fellowship.
- Why
- She aims to build AI that understands the world and provides useful, accurate, safe, and trustworthy help.
Key facts
- Undergraduate degree
- B.Tech. with honours in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, with a minor in Electrical Engineering.
- Master’s degree
- M.S. in Computer Science from New York University with a 4.0/4.0 GPA.
- Goldman Sachs
- Rose from analyst to vice president; led systems that helped triple trade volume and made firm-wide pricing ten times faster.
- NeurIPS 2024
- Her research was selected for an oral presentation; the work later surpassed 1,000 citations and 2,000 GitHub stars.
- Millennium
- Joined the Core AI team as its second AI engineering hire; systems she built were used by more than half of employees.
- Meta
- Worked on Llama’s multimodal capabilities before moving to Reality Labs to work on wearable AI.
- Public service
- Founded MettleFlow and built a WhatsApp triage chatbot that scaled to more than 100,000 concurrent requests during the COVID-19 hospital-bed crisis.
Sources
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