Jin Wu, a Ph.D. graduate of Purdue Polytechnic’s Bowen School of Construction, has joined Reflection AI, a pioneering research lab that has rapidly emerged as a major player in the artificial intelligence sector.
Wu joins the company after a three-and-a-half-year tenure at Google. Reflection AI, co-founded by former DeepMind researchers, recently made headlines for securing $2 billion in financing at an $8 billion valuation, with backing from industry leaders including NVIDIA. The company positions itself as an “open frontier AI lab,” aiming to develop large-scale models to challenge established competitors.
Wu’s trajectory underscores Purdue Polytechnic’s role in cultivating graduates who operate at the forefront of global technological innovation. At Reflection AI, he joins a team of researchers and engineers focused on building foundational models trained on trillions of tokens, targeting enterprise and sovereign AI markets.
At Purdue, Wu was the first Ph.D. student advised directly by Jiansong Zhang, an associate professor in the Bowen School of Construction. Wu conducted research in Zhang’s Automation and Intelligent Construction (AutoIC) Lab, focusing on invariant signatures theory and methods.
This National Science Foundation-funded research addressed the complex challenge of Building Information Modeling (BIM) interoperability—a problem that has cost the architecture, engineering and construction industries billions of dollars annually. Wu’s work on invariant signatures demonstrated a novel approach to achieving seamless communication between different software platforms, a fundamental shift from traditional standardization methods.
Zhang noted that the environment in the AutoIC Lab is designed to challenge students to become better versions of themselves. In addition to rigorous academic research, Zhang encouraged Wu to pursue summer internships at major technology companies—often referred to as the “Magnificent Seven”—to ensure he remained connected to the rapid pace of industry development. Now, Wu joins a top-tier team of with a goal of providing open-weight models in novel, massive markets, offering an alternative to closed-source systems from competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic.
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