Liquid AI's CEO:
Ramin Hasani spent a decade studying a 2-millimeter worm. He ended up building one of the most contrarian AI companies on the planet.
302 neurons. No brain. Yet the worm controlled 95 muscles better than any robot ever built. Ramin modeled it, solved a differential equation unsolved for over 100 years, and published it in Nature Machine Intelligence. He woke up to an inbox full of term sheets he never asked for.
That paper became Liquid AI.
In this ICONS episode, Ramin walks through the full story: from academia to MIT, the discovery of liquid neural networks, why he built on the exact opposite thesis to every other foundation model company, what two years at Vanguard taught him about trillion-dollar businesses, and what he believes the world looks like in 25 years when humans stop talking entirely.
Chapters:
00:00 Teaser
01:07 Introduction — Who is Ramin Hasani?
03:36 Life as an AI CEO: 18-hour days across Tokyo, Middle East, San Francisco
07:05 From Iran to Italy to Vienna — how he ended up in academia
11:59 C. Elegans: the worm with 302 neurons that controls 95 muscles
16:16 The discovery of liquid neural networks
18:57 Parking a car with 12 neurons
21:56 The unsolved equation: 100 years of neuroscience cracked
25:23 Nature Machine Intelligence, Hacker News, and the inbox that changed his life
27:02 Transformer architecture — and why it hits an energy wall
28:46 Liquid foundation models: exponential energy cut to linear
30:32 The jump from academia to company
40:09 Why Liquid AI raised $270M while others raised $20B
41:44 1.4 million downloads per week vs. Nvidia
52:28 Mercedes-Benz: closed in four months
53:42 Shopify: foundation models powering product search
59:44 The talent war: winning 3 out of 10 against Anthropic, xAI, Meta
01:04:26 The taste test: machine learning is an art
01:13:21 The goal: 50% of all devices by 2029
01:16:49 25 years from now: humans will stop talking
01:24:23 Rapid fire
About Ramin Hasani:
Persian-Austrian AI scientist and CEO of Liquid AI. Discovered liquid neural networks during his PhD at TU Vienna and MIT. Raised $270M at a $2.2B valuation. Partners include Mercedes-Benz, Shopify, Samsung, and AMD.
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