About

Shixiang Shane Gu is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, currently focusing on the Gemini Thinking team. Previously, he led the Multilinguality team for Gemini Post-Training, served as a senior researcher on the ChatGPT team, and led Japan market entry at OpenAI. He was also a founding member of Google Brain Robotics.

Shane is recognized for pioneering contributions across generative modeling, reinforcement learning, and reasoning in large language models (LLMs). His work includes co-inventing Gumbel-Softmax, developing sample-efficient deep reinforcement learning algorithms, co-authoring the seminal work on Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought prompting ("Let's think step by step"), and demonstrating how LLMs can self-improve through self-generated reasoning.

Academically, Shane holds a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, supervised by Richard E. Turner, Zoubin Ghahramani, and Bernhard Schölkopf. He earned his B.ASc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto.