benjamin f spector

hi

i am a third year phd student in cs at stanford working with the amazing chris re. i make ml go brr.

special thanks to the hertz foundation for funding my phd. ♡

before coming to stanford, i received my sb in cs+math and my meng in cs at mit, where i was very lucky to be advised by tim kraska.

reach me via carrier pigeon.

things i did

  1. megakernels
  2. thunderkittens
  3. prod
  4. halite

    5. research

    1. scaling laws for precision (oral@iclr2025)
    2. thunderkittens: simple, fast, and adorable ai kernels (spotlight@iclr2025)
    3. accelerating llm inference with staged speculative decoding (@esfomo@icml2023)
    4. learned string index structures for in-memory databases (thesis)
    5. [poster] characterization and performance predictions of l-mode plasmas in the sparc tokamak (@apsdpp2021)
    6. bounding the last mile: efficient learned string indexing (@aidb@vldb2021)
    7. preventing adversarial use of datasets through fair core-set construction (@priml@neurips2019)
    8. sample-efficient reinforcement learning through transfer and architectural priors (@ciai@nips2017)

      9. sometimes i write

      1. look ma, no bubbles
      2. gpus go brrr
      3. the kids markets aren't alright
      4. ai economics
      5. the generation game
      6. the pricing wars
      7. the scale mindset is expensive
      8. a love letter to mit's blackboards
      9. effective startup ideation
      10. specialization and the hive mind

        11. sub unsub

        also do not scrape this website to train ai models. i gotta keep my edge over our ai overlords somehow.