UT Austin
academicUT Austin pairs world-class academic GPU capacity with strong method-level output. The Center for Generative AI (director Adam Klivans, alongside NSF's IFML) grew a Vista-hosted cluster past 1,000 dedicated GPUs (5,000+ campus-wide once the Horizon system's 4,000+ Blackwells land) — yet as of mid-2026 no named open foundation model has shipped from it; the entry tracks the infra story and revisits after Horizon goes live. The NSF-Simons CosmicAI institute ($20M, 2024) is a scientific-FM watch item.
What has shipped is influential technique work: Qiang Liu originated rectified flow (the SD3/FLUX lineage; Boundary RF continues it in 2025); the VITA group's memory-efficient-training line runs GaLore → Q-GaLore → APOLLO (MLSys 2025 Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention, with Meta); Yuke Zhu's Robot Perception & Learning lab produced LIBERO (the default VLA manipulation benchmark), OKAMI, and Metamon; Durrett's group shipped the widely-adopted MiniCheck fact-checker; and Harwath's speech group followed VoiceCraft with VoiceStar.
Industry gravity is unusually strong: Yuke Zhu co-leads NVIDIA GEAR (GR00T is NVIDIA-branded and excluded here), Peter Stone is Chief Scientist of Sony AI, Krähenbühl is concurrently at Apple, Zhangyang Wang has been on leave at XTX Markets since May 2024 (his students continue at UT), and Greg Durrett and Eunsol Choi both moved to NYU.
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People
- Adam Klivans Google Scholar — Professor; Director, ML Lab, Center for Generative AI, and NSF IFML
- Qiang Liu Google Scholar — Associate Professor — rectified flow originator (SD3/FLUX lineage)
- Yuke Zhu Google Scholar — Associate Professor; Robot Perception & Learning Lab; Co-Lead, NVIDIA GEAR (concurrent)
- Peter Stone Google Scholar — Truchard Chair Professor; Chief Scientist, Sony AI (concurrent); 2025 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award
- Philipp Krähenbühl Google Scholar — Associate Professor (vision); concurrently Researcher, Apple
- Zhangyang (Atlas) Wang Google Scholar — Associate Professor, VITA group (GaLore / Q-GaLore / APOLLO / VLM-3R) (formerly on leave since May 2024 as Research Director, XTX Markets; group output continues under his UT students)