Leader profile

Ankit Gupta

Ankit Gupta is a General Partner at Y Combinator. He was the co-founder of Reverie Labs, which developed machine learning models for drug discovery, and ultimately advanced its own medicines to the clinic. Reverie was acquired by Ginkgo Bioworks in 2024. Prior to Reverie, Ankit was a deep learning researcher and has published at conferences like ICML. He has a BA and MS in Computer Science from Harvard.

Current role

Role: General Partner
Company: Y Combinator
Official link: https://ankitg.me/

Recent viewpoints

World models enable pre-programmed planning without environmental sampling.

Using the example of NASA's asteroid interception, the speaker illustrates that a perfect world model allows for pre-calculated trajectories that don't require adaptive sampling from the environment during execution.

Ankit Gupta World Models Source at 3:37

World models help estimate value functions and joint state-action distributions.

The speaker clarifies that in standard reinforcement learning, machine learning models are used to estimate value functions, and world models provide a framework for jointly modeling state transitions and policies to create more intelligent behavior.

Ankit Gupta Reinforcement Learning Source at 16:19

Self-driving car state and action spaces are effectively infinite.

The speaker describes the state space of a self-driving car as massive (including surroundings, vehicle state, weather) and calculates that even a simplified action space (steering, brake, gas) is vastly larger than in games like Go.

Ankit Gupta Self-Driving Source at 34:14

Dreamer V4 for robotics uses pre-trained diffusion models and tele-operation data.

The speaker cites a paper applying the Dreamer concept to robotics, which starts with an open-source video diffusion model and fine-tunes it with about 500 hours of tele-operation data to achieve cross-embodiment tasks.

Ankit Gupta Dreamer Architecture Source at 53:14

Recent interviews

World Models: An intuitive introduction

Jul 17, 2026

Major topics

Design IterationLast interview Aug 15, 2026 TypographyLast interview Aug 15, 2026 InternationalizationLast interview Aug 15, 2026 Visual PrototypingLast interview Aug 15, 2026 Logo DesignLast interview Aug 15, 2026 Project PlanningLast interview Aug 15, 2026 Creative CollaborationLast interview Aug 15, 2026 Meaningful DesignLast interview Aug 15, 2026 Accessible ComputingLast interview Aug 15, 2026 Design ConstraintsLast interview Aug 15, 2026