The Berkeley AI Research Lab celebrates its 2026 PhD graduates, highlighting their diverse research areas spanning robotics, large language models, computer vision, and more. The post lists graduates such as Baifeng Shi and Charlie Snell, who are moving to faculty positions, industry labs, and startups.
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UC Berkeley's BAIR lab announces the career destinations of its 2026 PhD graduates, spanning academia, industry, and entrepreneurship, reflecting trends in AI talent mobility.
According to the official BAIR blog, among the 2026 PhD graduates, Hanlin Zhu will join OpenAI as a technical staff member, Charlie Snell and Kevin Black will join Physical Intelligence, and Josh Kang will join Mistral AI. These moves reflect the trend of top AI talent flowing into industry.
Additionally, Grace Luo will take a research scientist role in industry, and Haozhi Qi will serve as a research scientist at Amazon while also holding a faculty position at the University of Chicago. This information comes from official announcements on the BAIR blog.
J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira will become an assistant professor of computer science at UCLA, and Eve Fleisig will be a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton's CITP. These academic positions highlight the competitiveness of BAIR graduates in academia.
Haozhi Qi holds both industry and academic positions, illustrating the possibility of a dual-track career path.
Graduates' research covers robot learning (e.g., Kevin Black, Haozhi Qi), LLM reasoning (e.g., Hanlin Zhu, Charlie Snell), AI safety and fairness (e.g., Eve Fleisig), human-computer interaction (e.g., J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira), and AI for Science (e.g., Junhao Xiong).
This diversity reflects the broad scope of AI research at the BAIR lab.
Some graduates are seeking collaborators or co-founders, such as Jiachen Lian, who is looking for AI talent to join his startup, Junhao Xiong, who is seeking a research scientist position, and Kaylo Littlejohn, who is looking for a research scientist/engineer role.
This indicates that some graduates are still exploring career paths rather than immediately settling on a destination.
This report is based on announcements from the official BAIR blog, a first-party source, but specific positions and destinations may change over time and have not been independently verified.
The career destinations of BAIR's 2026 PhD graduates are diverse, with a balance between industry and academia, as well as an entrepreneurial trend, reflecting the dynamism and diversity of the AI talent market.
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