Sharon Zhou

Sharon Zhou is an artificial intelligence researcher, entrepreneur and educator. She co-founded the enterprise language-model company Lamini and served in AI leadership roles at AMD. In November 2026, she announced that she had joined Anthropic, describing the move as a return to frontier-model research.^[1][4][5]

Her research includes the evaluation of generated images, the structure of learned representations, and training systems for GPU kernel generation. She has also taught courses on generative adversarial networks, diffusion models and fine-tuning.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12]}

Education and academic work

Zhou studied computer science and Classics at Harvard University. In a 2021 interview with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, she described becoming interested in computing through user-experience design and later moving from a product-management role at Google into doctoral research at Stanford University.^[2]

She completed a Stanford doctorate in generative AI, as described in her subsequent first-person account and conference biography. Andrew Ng was her doctoral adviser.^[4][5] Stanford's Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging lists her as an adjunct lecturer in computer science.^[3]

Career

Lamini

Zhou co-founded Lamini in 2022 and served as its CEO. In a November 2023 interview, she dated the company's start to the previous year, before ChatGPT's release. She described its purpose as helping enterprises adapt and run language models using their own data.^[4]

Her account of the platform covered data ingestion, model fine-tuning, retrieval, reinforcement learning from feedback and inference. It also discussed supporting different computing environments, including AMD GPUs. These were descriptions of Lamini's product and engineering approach, rather than independent comparisons of its performance against other platforms.^[4]

DeepLearning.AI's August 2023 announcement of Finetuning Large Language Models identified Zhou as Lamini's co-founder and CEO. Later conference biographies describe that role as preceding her work at AMD.^[5][13]

AMD

A 2025 conference biography identified Zhou as AMD's corporate vice president of AI. AMD's own 2026 Advancing AI event page listed her as AI Chief of Staff.^[5][6] The company's public announcement of that appointment said it was intended to support AI leadership, partnerships and customer work.^[14]

In her November 2026 departure announcement, Zhou said she had built and led an AI research organization at AMD and served as executive sponsor for its frontier-laboratory partnerships. She also described work on reinforcement-learning approaches to kernel optimization, and said some colleagues had accompanied her from Lamini to AMD.^[1]

Anthropic

Zhou's November 2026 announcement stated that she had joined Anthropic. She said she wanted to return to research on frontier models and thanked her former AMD team and Lisa Su. The post establishes the move, but does not identify the particular model, team or research program she would work on.^[1]

Research

Zhou's publications span generative-model evaluation and systems for training and deploying models. Selected work includes:

The AMDKernelVault paper describes pipelines that turn PyTorch references into kernels, validate candidates under ROCm and profile their execution. It demonstrates supervised fine-tuning and execution-aware reinforcement learning with Qwen3-8B. The paper's results concern the reported workloads and evaluation budgets, rather than every AMD GPU or every kernel-generation task.^[9]

Zhou was also a co-author of the June 2024 preprint Banishing LLM Hallucinations Requires Rethinking Generalization. The arXiv record marks the paper as withdrawn in September 2025. Its earlier model claims should therefore not be presented as established evidence that Lamini, or language models generally, solved hallucination.^[15]

Teaching

Zhou has taught practical generative-AI courses through DeepLearning.AI and Coursera. The course pages describe different areas of model development:

DeepLearning.AI announced its GAN specialization in September 2020 with Zhou as the course instructor. Its 2023 fine-tuning course announcement connects her teaching to her work at Lamini.^[13][16]

Recognition

MIT Technology Review included Zhou in its global Innovators Under 35 list in 2022, recognizing her work on benchmarks for evaluating generated content and images.^[17]

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• AMDAdvanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American semiconductor company that designs the CPUs, GPUs, and data-center accelerators powering one of the largest AI compute build-outs in the industry.Mentioned 12 times above
• AnthropicAnthropic is an American artificial intelligence (AI) safety and research company founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and other former OpenAI researchers, best known for the Claude family of large…Mentioned 3 times above
• NNoam ShazeerNoam Shazeer (born 1975 or 1976) is an American computer scientist and software engineer who is one of the most prolific and influential researchers in the modern era of deep learning, best known as a…Also in AI Research
• OOriol VinyalsOriol Vinyals (born 1983, Sabadell, Catalonia, Spain) is a Spanish machine learning researcher who is a co-founder of Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation launched on August 5, 2026 with the stated…Also in AI Research
• TTri DaoTri Dao is a computer scientist who created the FlashAttention family of GPU attention algorithms and co-created the Mamba selective state-space architectureAlso in AI Research
• PPercy LiangPercy Liang is a professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Machine LearningAlso in AI Research

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References

1. ^1 ^2 ^3Sharon Zhou (@realSharonZhou). Announcement that she had joined Anthropic. X, November 4, 2026 UTC; rendered post inspected November 5, 2026.
2. ^Stanford HAI. Sharon Zhou: We Can't Solve Society's Problems While Working in Silos. January 4, 2021.
3. ^Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. Sharon Zhou. Academic directory, accessed November 5, 2026.
4. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Matt Turck and Sharon Zhou. Lamini: Fine-Tuning LLMs for the Enterprise with CEO Sharon Zhou. The MAD Podcast, November 8, 2023. Interview and transcript.
5. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4The AI Conference. Sharon Zhou, 2025 speaker biography. Accessed November 5, 2026.
6. ^AMD. Advancing AI 2026. Official event and speaker page, accessed November 5, 2026.
7. ^1 ^2Sharon Zhou et al. HYPE: A Benchmark for Human eYe Perceptual Evaluation of Generative Models. arXiv:1904.01121, April 1, 2019; revised October 31, 2019.
8. ^1 ^2Sharon Zhou, Eric Zelikman, Fred Lu, Andrew Y. Ng, Gunnar Carlsson and Stefano Ermon. Evaluating the Disentanglement of Deep Generative Models through Manifold Topology. arXiv:2006.03680; ICLR 2021.
9. ^1 ^2 ^3Ji Liu et al. AMDKernelVault: Large-Scale Datasets and Agentic Training for AMD GPU Kernel Optimization. arXiv:2609.12471, September 11, 2026.
10. ^1 ^2DeepLearning.AI. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Course and instructor information, accessed November 5, 2026.
11. ^1 ^2DeepLearning.AI. How Diffusion Models Work. Accessed November 5, 2026.
12. ^1 ^2DeepLearning.AI. Finetuning Large Language Models. Accessed November 5, 2026.
13. ^1 ^2DeepLearning.AI Community Team. Enroll in Finetuning Large Language Models. August 23, 2023.
14. ^AMD. Announcement of Zhou's AI Chief of Staff appointment. Public company post, accessed November 5, 2026.
15. ^Johnny Li et al. Banishing LLM Hallucinations Requires Rethinking Generalization. Original preprint June 25, 2024; arXiv records withdrawal on September 3, 2025.
16. ^DeepLearning.AI. Introducing the Generative Adversarial Networks Specialization. September 30, 2020.
17. ^MIT Technology Review. Sharon Zhou, Innovators Under 35. Global list, 2022.

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