Ethan Lai

I'm an undergrad at Stanford University studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I'm interested in Physical AI, world models, and low-latency, hardware-accelerated systems.

I like building things that bridge the gap between software and the physical world — whether that's quantized models for Physical AI or autonomous robots in space.

Most of my time goes into robots. Right now that means Deploy, a YC startup building production-grade robot deployments, and the Tambe Lab, where I'm getting vision-language-action models small enough to run on the computer that sits on the robot. It's PyTorch in the morning and C in the afternoon. Last summer I was a forward-deployed engineer at Wedge, another YC startup, which mostly meant getting ML pipelines to run on old hospital servers without breaking anything HIPAA cares about. The thread through all of it is latency: making models small and fast enough for the hardware that is actually there.

If any of that sounds interesting, email me at ethanlai@stanford.edu.