Meet the Gen Z duo who turned down Musk to build their own AI
William Chen and Guan Wang, both 22 from Michigan, said no to a multimillion-dollar offer from Elon Musk's xAI.
Instead, they're all in on their own AI project—the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM)—which is inspired by how the human brain mixes fast instincts with thoughtful planning.
From robotics club to taking on tech giants
Chen and Wang bonded back in high school over drones and late nights in robotics labs.
Their earlier project, OpenChat, got noticed by Musk himself—but they stuck with HRM because they see planning, memory, and reasoning as core for smarter AI.
Outsmarting the big names—With fewer resources
Their 27-million-parameter prototype has outperformed models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek on tough reasoning tasks like ARC-AGI tests and Sudoku puzzles—no fancy prompting needed.
For them, building better AI means rethinking everything about how these systems work.