Hi! I'm Jacob, and I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, where I'm advised by Noah Smith and supported by an NSF Computer Science Graduate Fellowship. I'm also a student researcher on the Open Ecosystem team at Ai2, where I mainly work on language models, and an AI Fellow at Madrona Venture Group.

Before my Ph.D., I worked on code generation at Google [x] and platform health at Twitter, and in a previous life I was a software engineer at Tableau and Google. See my CV for more details.

What I work on

Language models

I work broadly on the full model development pipeline, from model architecture to pretraining and post-training. My work generally aims to improve both overall model capabilities and the downstream efficiency and flexibility of state of the art models.

Technology & Society

I also study the impact of AI and other emerging technologies on society writ large. I've studied the environmental cost of building and deploying language models, from hardware manufacturing through deployment and for reasoning models, and I've written about legal questions raised by generative AI, such as liability, legal risk, and the First Amendment.

I now spend some of my time thinking about the environmental impact of data center buildouts, energy policy in the U.S. and Washington State, and the impact of AI deployment on public education and labor.

Selected awards

  • May 2025Mercor Graduate Fellowship Finalist
  • Aug 2024ACL Theme Paper Award
  • Aug 2024ACL Best Resource Paper Award
  • Apr 2024GeekWire Innovation of the Year
  • Aug 2023NSF Computer Science Graduate Fellowship

Selected publications

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* indicates equal contribution

Talks & press