Jenny Zhang

I am a member of the founding team at Recursive. We are building AI that recursively self-improves.

Previously, I did my PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of British Columbia and was a graduate student at the Vector Institute. I was also a research scientist intern at Meta. I completed my undergraduate studies at Imperial College London. My research focuses on Reinforcement Learning, Self-Improving AI, and Open-Endedness.

I have two first names: Jenny (English) and Zhuoting (Chinese).

Selected Publications

Hyperagents

Hyperagents

Jenny Zhang, Bingchen Zhao, Wannan Yang, Jakob Foerster, Jeff Clune, Minqi Jiang, Sam Devlin, Tatiana Shavrina

2026

Darwin Gödel Machine

Darwin Gödel Machine

Jenny Zhang *, Shengran Hu *, Cong Lu, Robert Lange +, Jeff Clune +

ICLR 2026

OMNI-EPIC: Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness with Environments Programmed in Code

OMNI-EPIC: Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness with Environments Programmed in Code

Maxence Faldor *, Jenny Zhang *, Antoine Cully +, Jeff Clune +

ICLR 2025

OMNI: Open-endedness via models of human notions of interestingness

OMNI: Open-endedness via models of human notions of interestingness

Jenny Zhang, Joel Lehman, Kenneth Stanley, Jeff Clune

ICLR 2024, NeurIPS 2023 ALOE Workshop Spotlight

Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback

Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback

Herbie Bradley *, Andrew Dai *, Hannah Teufel, Jenny Zhang, Koen Oostermeijer, Marco Bellagente, Jeff Clune, Kenneth Stanley, Grégory Schott, Joel Lehman

ICLR 2024

Quality Diversity through Human Feedback

Quality Diversity through Human Feedback

Li Ding, Jenny Zhang, Jeff Clune, Lee Spector, Joel Lehman

ICML 2024, NeurIPS 2023 ALOE Workshop Spotlight

Selected Media Coverage

VentureBeatFortuneAlife NewsletterFast CompanyMIT Technology ReviewIEEE SpectrumFortuneMIT Technology ReviewThe RegisterHacker NewsWiredScienceNewsAir Street PressThe Logic

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Recent News

May 2026
Part of the founding team at Recursive, with a valuation of $4.65B.
Mar 2026
Released Hyperagents, covered by VentureBeat and Fortune.
2026
Darwin Gödel Machine was accepted at ICLR 2026.
2026
Gave an invited keynote and seminar at the Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS) Melbourne.
2026
Gave an invited talk at Tsinghua University.
2026
Gave an invited talk at the UC Santa Barbara NLP Seminar.
2026
Gave an invited opening talk at the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
2026
Received the President's Academic Excellence Initiative PhD Award from the University of British Columbia.
2026
Served as a reviewer for ICLR and ICML, earning Gold reviewer recognition (top 25%) at ICML.
Spring 2026
Featured in the Machine Learning course at Tsinghua University.
Fall 2025
Featured in Stanford's Self-Improving AI Agents (CS329A).
Fall 2025
2025
OMNI-EPIC was accepted at ICLR 2025.
2025
2025
The Darwin Gödel Machine was shared by Jack Dorsey on X (1, 2, 3).
2025
Provided commentary in Nature on AI for scientific software.
2025
Gave an invited talk at the London Summit on Open-Endedness.
2025
Gave an invited talk at Meta London.
2025
Gave an invited talk at the Stanford NLP Lab.
2024
OMNI was accepted at ICLR 2024.
2024
Covered by Wired and ScienceNews.
2024
Featured in the State of AI Report and in Air Street Press.
2023
Good Time to Ask received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots.