David Cao

Incoming Research Scientist Intern at d_model (Summer 2026) — fundamental AI research lab pushing the frontiers of RLVR, interpretability, and agents for aligned superintelligence. Lean team of OpenAI, DeepMind, and Redwood alums.

About

I'm a sophomore at Harvard College pursuing an A.B. in Physics & Statistics (Machine Learning) with a secondary in Computer Science. I grew up in McLean, Virginia and attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. There, I was a Regeneron STS finalist and AIME qualifier.

I am primarily interested in understanding why and how machine learning models understand concepts, and I look to borrow intuition from physics.

I am also involved in startups and venture capital investing. Feel free to reach out!

Research

• Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher at the Kempner Institute — training novel sparse autoencoders on larger models and analyzing feature geometries. Working under Sumedh Hindupur in Demba Ba's lab.
• AI Evals Researcher at Harvard SEAS — tested LLMs-as-a-judge for automated AI misalignment detection
• ML Research Engineer — built U-Net models to convert galaxy images to metallicity maps
• Theoretical Astrophysics Researcher at GMU — first-author paper in The Astrophysical Journal on the probability of panspermia

Startups

• Founding Research Engineer at Polymr — trained entity classification models for manufacturing knowledge graphs
• Silicon Validation Engineer at Instachip (YC W25) — designed photonic circuits for unitary transformations

Venture Capital

• Investment Partner at The MBA Fund — leading early-stage seed investments in AI/ML and software
• VC Investment Intern at HOF Capital — conducted deep tech diligence for a $6B+ AUM firm

Miscellaneous

Clubs & Activities

• Member of Technical Team @ AI Safety Student Team (AISST)
• Directed Reading Program with Dr. Itay Lavie — statistical field theory of neural networks
• Ex-Director @ HPAIR (Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations)
• Ex-Principal @ HUCP (Harvard Undergraduate Capital Partners)
• Ex-Analyst @ CBE (Consulting for Business & Environment)

Sports

• Varsity sprinter, track & field
• 235 lb bench PR
• Pickleball / tennis / golf

Travel

• Place I currently want to visit the most: Auckland, New Zealand

Other

• Chess (top 10 in State, 2nd at Nationals)
• Geometry Dash (beat all Robtop demons)
• (Over)thinking