2026 PhD Residency - Physical ML & Hardware-in-the-Loop (Future of Compute)

Project Goal: This is the flagship moonshot for 'The Future of Compute' at X (the Moonshot Factory). This project is aimed at moving away from simulating physics on digital chips and instead building physical machines whose dynamics ARE the computation itself, achieving a 1,000,000x improvement in useful compute per Joule. This residency focuses on bridging the gap between physical dynamical systems and machine learning code. Instead of modeling physics in a vacuum, you will work directly with physical silicon test chips and laboratory instrumentation to make them trainable. You will build the software-to-hardware calibration pipelines that demonstrate we can train a real physical substrate to match digital baseline accuracy at a fraction of the energy cost.…