Meet the Team

We're a passionate group of researchers and engineers dedicated to building the future of world models through open science and community collaboration.

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Louis Castricato

CEO

Hey I'm Louis, CEO of OpenWorld Labs. I'm incredibly excited to be doing an open science lab, returning to my roots of decentralized research. We believe that the future of world models requires a variety of different perspectives to truly consider what is best for the community, and we're incredibly excited to be building alongside everyone. I have half a decade in large scale open science experience and have worked at a number of large labs, previously leading CarperAI – for a time the largest open science LLM post training group, releasing what was at the time the most popular post training framework, trlX. I have also worked as Head of LLMs at Stability AI and a co-founder/member of technical staff at SynthLabs where I worked on reasoning models, tool use, and synthetic data.

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Shahbuland Matiana

CSO

Hello everyone, I'm Shahbuland: CSO of OpenWorld Labs. I've loved video games since I was two years old and my older cousins (irresponsibly) let me play Mortal Kombat on the original PlayStation. I became captivated early on by the concepts of AI and VR. I became obsessed with the dream of what I saw as the ultimate video game: A fully immersive experience, akin to a lucid dream, where you can guide the world being built around you based on your personal preferences and desires. I previously co-founded CarperAI with Louis, where I worked on representation learning and RLHF, which I continued at StabilityAI working on alignment for text-to-image models. After that I went around some startups, working on diffusion, multimodality, and world models. The last one stuck, as it seems to be the first tangible way to make my dream a reality. So now, at OpenWorld Labs, I am building the experience I've dreamed of playing my whole life.

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Spencer Frazier

Founding Advisor

Hey, I'm Spencer and I am excited to be joining two amazing founders at the beginning of Open World Lab's journey as a Founding Advisor. It has been a passion and profession of mine to support accomplished engineers and researchers in the rapidly advancing field of AI for quite some time now. I've been enthusiastic about gaming since I was young. The worlds of computer science, AI, research, startups, angel investing and established industry took a little more convincing. I look forward to supporting such a promising team and will always continue to support groundbreaking ideas, products and ethical, open science in any form. OpenWorld Labs is the intersection of many of my passions and represents the core of my professional ethos.

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Eric Sheen

Member of Technical Staff

Hello, I'm Eric: Member of Technical Staff at OpenWorld Labs. Growing up I've always enjoyed gaming, which has led to me work on large scale orchestration systems and 3D graphics. I'm happy to be joining OpenWorld Labs to work at the intersection of these 2 problems. I have half a decade of experience building large scale systems and tools. Most recently leading 936 Labs, I architected distributed GPU pipelines for video data labeling and API inference. Before that I worked at Reka AI as a Member of Technical Staff working on agent orchestration and product. I have also worked at DeepAI as a researcher where I built a synthetic video generation framework for text-to-video generation, distributed GPU orchestration, as well as the some of the early datasets and finetuning scripts for video models like CogVideoX and OpenSoraPlan. All these experiences has now led me to OpenWorld Labs where I'll be powering a new frontier of reality.