Phillip Wang

Hi! I'm Phillip Wang, a technologist and builder who cares a lot about people. I love working obsessively on my passions, which today include the Metaverse, virtual reality, and telepresence. (If you're someone building in these spaces, I'd love to get in touch!)

One of my fundamental beliefs after spending an amazing year working on Siempre is that digital social interactions are underexplored, especially when it comes to virtual worlds. If we can get it right, I believe the Metaverse will open up access to human connection on the same scale the Internet opened up access to information. In the limit we could remove the physical barriers to opportunity and connection, so that it won't matter where you live in terms of what job you can get or who you can be close to.

Our approach at Gather is to be extremely pragmatic. We build products that people will use and love today, so that people will understand the value of the Metaverse first-hand. Many of our users have never even heard of "the Metaverse" before, and shouldn't need to!

In the past I learned a lot by building and launching various projects, like Subtle Asian Matches (dating app with 20k+ users), SquareCraft (Producthunt), and RoboVote (featured on Wired). Otherwise, I've built a 3D holographic video chat, a walking stick for blind people at the range of 40 feet, a full-sized humanoid robot controlled through VR, and experimented with noise cancelling speakers. In almost none of these projects do I work alone!

In a previous life I did AI research with a focus on realizing real-world impact of the amazing technology. worked on the MineRL project, using Minecraft to research imitation learning and sample-efficient RL. We released the large-scale imitation learning dataset and got a paper accepted to IJCAI 2019 and are hosting a NeurIPS competition. I previously conducted research in meta-learning with Brandon Amos and released the first open-source implementation of SNAIL, a popular meta-learning architecture. I spent a good year at Microsoft building NLP models for emails, and an even better summer at Cruise Automation doing Computer Vision.