About
I grew up in San Francisco and have spent most of my life in Europe, which gives me an uncomfortable front-row seat to the gap between them. Europe has the talent, the rigour, and the infrastructure. What it lacks is permission to be audacious. I think that's starting to change, and ambition has a flywheel effect.
I build systems that work. My instinct with any complex problem is to decompose it down to first principles, strip away the abstractions until the underlying mechanics are legible, and then reason back up from there. Whether it's a robot learning to manipulate objects, a protocol handling millions in liquidity, or an inference stack running on edge hardware, the same discipline applies: find the feedback loops, close them, and iterate. Most of my work takes place at the intersection of theory and implementation. I care about understanding why something works, not just that it does.
I compulsively obsess over the long arc of the future. A hundred years from now, I see humanity among the stars having moved beyond Earth and thriving across the solar system. I believe aligned AI will be the key driver of breakthroughs in biology, medicine, materials science, and robotics, and that energy abundance, unlocked by nuclear fusion and solar power in space, will be the foundation for all of it.
What I think about
The economic impact of self-improving systems is hard to overstate. At some threshold, capability compounds faster than we can track, and I think we're closer to that threshold than most people act like. I care most about what happens after the LLM scaling era: genuinely autonomous systems, and making sure that transition happens in the open.
Humanoids will solve labor shortages, lead planetary expeditions, and drive the next industrial revolution. The next step for artificial intelligence is the physical world. I'm currently leading software development for the ETH Robotics Club's humanoid robot in Zurich.
The most inherently interdisciplinary field I know. Augmenting cognition and building a safe interface with superintelligent systems is what excites me most. A genuine game-changer for people with disabilities and potentially for all of us. Intro reading.
I have deep experience here in smart contracts and high-performance DeFi infrastructure. I believe a decentralized financial system native to the internet is the future of money, and it's encouraging to see traditional finance finally catching up.
Work and research
Leading AI and software development for a student built humanoid robot at ETHZ. Working on Unitree G1s for testing and integration. Full-stack deployment of VLA models (Nvidia GR00T), teleoperation and data pipelines, and industrial automation pilots.
Built and contributed to multiple high-performance onchain financial applications on Ethereum, Sui and Solana, including DeepBook, Gelato and Suilend.
Sourced and led a pre-seed deal for Stacksync (YC F23) at Switzerland's largest pre-seed fund, targeting EPFL and ETH Zurich.
Researched semantic uncertainty to improve LLM decoding for reasoning tasks under Prof. Martin Jäggi, back when chain-of-thought was a genuine breakthrough. [paper]
Built one of the first cross-chain money markets on Solana and Ethereum. Seed-funded, acquired 2023.
Placed 2nd in the Swiss National Science and Youth Competition. Published on gravitational lensing and dark matter distribution in the Milky Way.
Reading list
- How to do great work, Paul Graham
- The decade ahead, Leopold Aschenbrenner
- The ethos of the divine age, Pirate Wires
- Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster
- What I wish someone had told me, Sam Altman
- Hackers and painters, Paul Graham
Culture
Competitive swimmer. F1. Harleys. Music that aged before I was born.
Contact
Academic: dfoodeei@ethz.ch
Everything else: darius.foodei@gmail.com