Our team

Hey I'm Louis, CEO of Overworld. I'm incredibly excited to be doing an open science lab, returning to my roots of decentralized research. We believe that the future of world models requires a variety of different perspectives to truly consider what is best for the community, and we're incredibly excited to be building alongside everyone. I have half a decade in large scale open science experience and have worked at a number of large labs, previously leading CarperAI – for a time the largest open science LLM post training group, releasing what was at the time the most popular post training framework, trlX. I have also worked as Head of LLMs at Stability AI and a co-founder/member of technical staff at SynthLabs where I worked on reasoning models, tool use, and synthetic data.

Holly Solgot is a strategy and partnerships leader specializing in helping early stage and growing companies scale sustainably. At Overworld, she focuses on strategic partnerships, operational growth, and advising startups on building systems that support long-term impact. With experience working alongside founders and leadership teams, Holly brings a pragmatic approach to consulting, helping bridge big picture with execution. Her work centers on aligning partnerships, operations, and growth initiatives to move organizations from idea to scale.

Hello everyone, I'm Shahbuland: Head of Mathematical Research at Overworld. I've loved video games since I was two years old and my older cousins (irresponsibly) let me play Mortal Kombat on the original PlayStation. I became captivated early on by the concepts of AI and VR. I became obsessed with the dream of what I saw as the ultimate video game: A fully immersive experience, akin to a lucid dream, where you can guide the world being built around you based on your personal preferences and desires. I previously co-founded CarperAI with Louis, where I worked on representation learning and RLHF, which I continued at StabilityAI working on alignment for text-to-image models. After that I went around some startups, working on diffusion, multimodality, and world models. The last one stuck, as it seems to be the first tangible way to make my dream a reality. So now, at Overworld, I am building the experience I've dreamed of playing my whole life.

Hey, I'm Spencer and I am excited to be joining two amazing founders at the beginning of Overworld's journey as a Founding Advisor. It has been a passion and profession of mine to support accomplished engineers and researchers in the rapidly advancing field of AI for quite some time now. I've been enthusiastic about gaming since I was young. The worlds of computer science, AI, research, startups, angel investing and established industry took a little more convincing. I look forward to supporting such a promising team and will always continue to support groundbreaking ideas, products and ethical, open science in any form. Overworld is the intersection of many of my passions and represents the core of my professional ethos.

Hey, I'm Sami, Member of Technical Staff at Overworld. Growing up, I played endless hours of Dota 1 and Dota 2, oftentimes against bots, since internet connectivity was rare and unreliable. I had my first real experience with AI When OpenAI's Dota agent released, and it solved the game I spent a decade learning. This led me to start my journey at CarperAI working on RLHF for language models alongside Louis and Shahbuland. After that, I built planet-scale data pipelines at Bloomberg and conducted research on self-supervised learning and video generation for robotics at Brown. I'm convinced that world models will be the most important leap forward in AI, and, the key to truly immersive gaming. Working with this incredible team at Overworld feels like the perfect way to turn that my original fascination into something that could change how we experience virtual worlds entirely.

Hi, I'm Andrew Lapp, Member of Technical Staff on the Pretraining Team. My work spans machine learning, applied statistics, and software engineering, and I contribute extensively to open-source systems used in production for transformer training and inference. I'm also a competitive ML practitioner and Kaggle gold medalist. Drawn to Overworld's frontier work in world modeling, I contributed to its open-source infrastructure, delivering a 3x training-throughput improvement, before ultimately joining the team. My focus is on disciplined, research-driven experiments to accelerate progress in world modeling.

I'm a Member of Technical Staff at Overworld, training foundational models and scaling inference pipelines for Interactive Video Models. I believe diffusion world models can bring gaming and computer graphics to life. My work focuses on finding interesting solutions and scaling them up, from video generation to interactive simulations. Previously, I worked at the Vision and AI Lab at IISc on video models for relighting and 3D tasks. I've also published research on world models that simulate reactive behavior in games. My background spans computer vision, generative AI, and graphics programming.

Scottie Fox is an ML research engineer and rapid prototyper working on real-time AI generative systems, diffusion models, and world-model–driven 360° imagery. A father of four, music lover, and passionate cook, he blends creative disciplines with technical rigor, moving quickly from idea to prototype while turning complex technology into tangible, human-centered products.

Hi, I'm Aaron, I work primarily on infrastructure at Overworld. Distributed computing is how you get the model's brain to live in more than one physical place, and how you get a lot of users to all exist in the same non-physical place. I have years of experience contributing to open source computing and AI libraries. My most recent work is on machine learning for signal analysis, reliability and real-time AI SRE workflows. Games are the all-time AI sandbox. 'Machine Learning' was originally about checkers! The more open-ended the game, the closer the sandbox is to real life. I'm looking forward to pushing forward the limits of how much of the world we can capture, and how many worlds we can make. Jhin main.

Hi, I'm Wei Pyn, I work on 'product engineering', duct taping together vibes and whatever Louis tells me to do into systems that don't collapse (...for now). From hobbyist ML training of very weird model architectures and writing cursed GPU kernels, I rewrote (in rust) and maintained Overworld's open-source Owl Control, used for recording gameplay inputs to construct the datasets used to train world models, before joining the team fulltime. My only contribution is keeping it silly, occasionally useful, and (so far) mostly in production.

G'day, I'm Mithun, and I'm a creative technologist helping bring our world models to you! I've always seen video games as a medium capable of so much more than the industry has let them be - and I've spent my adult life (and some of my teenage life!) trying to unlock that potential and to bring it to as many people as I can. That quest has taken me through game modding, systems programming, VR, and now AI - all fostered by a love of sandbox and narrative games that draw players into their worlds. Before Overworld, I worked in the games industry - from AAA to a startup building a game engine for real-time multiplayer creation - and contributed to open-source AI, including authoring the GGUF specification. Now, at Overworld, it feels like everything's coming together: we're finally paving the way to making the holodeck real, and we're going to put it in everyone's hands. The future is ours to share.

Brandon Woodard is an AR/VR engineer and scientist with a background in developing human-centered systems that use applied computer vision and interactive graphics for creative tools and multimedia. His PhD training at Brown University focuses on how AR/VR systems can infer user intent using multimodal feedback. In his free time, he enjoys gaming, listening to house music, and weight lifting.

Dave has been managing web based communities of varying sizes for 25 years. A lifelong gamer and tech enthusiast, Dave has a degree in Philosophy and Religion and loves to spend time reading, gaming, and teaching his kids the finer points of 80s action films. As Overworld's community manager, he is keeping our community informed and keeps his finger on the pulse of our users to help the team dynamically adapt.