Shunya Research
Intelligence that will eat the world.
We are an independent research lab in Bangalore, India, working on embodied intelligence, robotics, world models, neuromorphic systems, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind.
We think AI is fundamentally a problem about how minds work, not a problem of statistical optimization alone.
Scaling text has produced impressive systems that still cannot learn continually, cannot reason about the consequences of their own actions in a physical space, and cannot run on the twenty watts a human brain runs on. Terabytes of VRAM, billions in capital, and almost all of humanity's knowledge, and the AI that solves cancer is nowhere in sight. Something fundamental is missing from the approach.
Our bet is experience, not imitation. Agents that build predictive models of the world by acting in it, and architectures that imitate the brain and sensorimotor systems to be more sample- and energy-efficient.
This is not the mainstream direction. We think it is the one that gets to genuine intelligence. Read our thesis.
Team
Sachit Ramesha Gowda — computer vision, neuroscience. X, site.
Dhruv Patankar — reinforcement learning, neuromorphic computing. X, Substack.
If this resonates, we want to hear from you, whether that is mentorship, funding, or compute.
Support
Independent research runs on your support. Contributions go directly into compute and hardware.
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