The AI alchemist

Text: Lester Hio / Photo: Hillary Tan

When artificial intelligence (AI) took the world by storm in 2022 with the public success of ChatGPT, Dr Tay Yi knew it was at a turning point.

An AI researcher at Google at the time, working in the advanced DeepMind research laboratory, Dr Tay decided to trust in his own vision for AI by founding a startup.

He co-founded Reka AI in 2023 along with former researchers from Google DeepMind and Meta. The San Francisco-based startup creates generative AI models that can process text, image, video, audio and PDF inputs.

Companies which use Reka AI’s models as their AI backend can, in effect, create AI personas that are able to read, listen and speak, since they can accept and process a wide variety of inputs.

Reka AI has raised US$110 million to date, and has a latest valuation of US$1.3 billion as of July 2024. The startup counts among its partners the likes of major firms such as Alibaba Cloud, Nvidia and Oracle.

Dr Tay received his Bachelor of Engineering in 2016 and later earned a PhD, both from NTU. He was the winner of the Outstanding PhD Thesis Award in 2020. He also published a total of 42 papers in top-tier machine-learning journals in that time.

As its Chief Scientist, Dr Tay is able to combine his love of research with innovation in steering Reka AI against a sea of established competitors, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

During his time in Google, Dr Tay contributed to many high-profile projects. He was the co-lead of PaLM-2, the brains behind Google’s AI model. He also invented UL2, a universal tool for pretraining AI models, and Differentiable Search Indexes, which produces better, faster search results. His work was integrated into several Google products, such as Google Assistant, YouTube, and Search.

It was a field which did not have many Singaporeans. “One of the biggest challenges I faced was that I was a Singaporean researcher on an uncharted and unprecedented path,” says Dr Tay. “Therefore, I did not have any footsteps to follow or much mentorship as I started standing on the world stage. I overcame this by believing in myself and not being afraid of being the first on any pathway.”

While cracking the code to a successful startup, Dr Tay is also figuring out how to balance the hard work and sacrifice with living his own life.

He admits that he finds it hard to switch off from work at times, as he enjoys writing code and running experiments.

Slowing down and enjoying moments with his wife and newborn baby girl is something he consciously tries to do, being aware that many in his field run the risk of burning out. When time permits, the classical music lover also enjoys tickling the ivories on a keyboard of a more traditional make.

Dr Tay Yi with his wife, a music professional, and daughter.

Dr Tay fondly remembers his time in NTU as a committee member of the NTU Piano Ensemble. “I enjoyed hanging out in the small piano room in Nanyang House, because it was very cozy with interesting vibes.”

In fact, he believes that AI music composition is well within reach of current technology, with multiple companies, including Google, working on this. “The only question is whether AI can compose a top hit, which I think will be achieved eventually. I have not dabbled in this personally but maybe someday,” says Dr Tay.

 

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This article first appeared in issue 5 of U, the NTU alumni magazine.