The World Is Not Enough: RL’s Environment Problem

Thais Castello Branco is the founder and CEO of Taste, building the taste infrastructure layer for AI across subjective domains, starting with design. Taste works with frontier labs on post-training data and RL environments, and with app-layer companies to improve and evaluate generations at inference time. Taste recently closed a $16.1M seed round led by Amplify and CRV, and is hiring across engineering and ML research. 

Vincent Weisser is CEO and co-founder of Prime Intellect, an open frontier AI lab and infrastructure platform for self-improving agents, powering companies like Perplexity, Ramp, and Arcee. Prime Intellect has released the open-weight INTELLECT model series and foundational research in distributed training and scaling RL. 

Sarah Catanzaro is a general partner at Amplify Partners, where she focuses on investing in and advising startups in AI, data management and distributed systems. Catanzaro previously worked on data strategy and led data science and AI teams for defense tech companies including Mattermark, Palantir and Cyveillance. She was also a program director at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit.

Nicolai Ouporov is the CEO of Fleet, which develops interactive simulation environments to teach AI models. He is a practicing artist, former ballet dancer, and robotist.