{"id":50030,"date":"2025-07-16T14:57:25","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T18:57:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine\/?p=50030"},"modified":"2025-11-10T15:59:45","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T20:59:45","slug":"eager-disruptter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine\/changemakers\/eager-disruptter\/","title":{"rendered":"An Eager Disrupter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Brandon Duderstadt, Engr \u201918,\u201919 (MSE), is not afraid of change\u2014he runs toward it, eager to find opportunities to disrupt existing technologies and explore new frontiers. That attitude led him to co-found Nomic AI, which has produced several of the world\u2019s most popular AI products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\"\"\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe founding insight of Nomic was that there really needs to be a system that\u2019s highly interactive and highly visual that\u2019s tailored toward the kind of data sets that go into and come out of AI models,\u201d he says. \u201cToday, it\u2019s petabytes of unstructured text, images, video, and audio with additional metadata sitting on top of it. So it just felt like a totally different problem that required a totally different kind of paradigm.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Founded in 2021 by Duderstadt and Andriy Mulyar, who interned for Duderstadt at startup Rad AI, Nomic AI is valued at $100 million and was kickstarted by $2 million in venture capital funding in 2022. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company\u2019s products include GPT4All, an open- source tool that enables language models to run on a personal computer or smartphone and became the third-fastest-growing repository ever on GitHub, a cloud-based platform for code collaboration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(By comparison, Twitter\u2019s algorithm was No. 2.) In addition, there\u2019s Nomic Embed, a suite of open- source models that enable AI personalization through a technology called retrieval augmented generation; and Atlas, the unstructured data engine that powers all of Nomic\u2019s models. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A self-described \u201cresearcher at heart,\u201d Duderstadt says he had a number of foundational experiences that put him on the AI path at Johns Hopkins, where he earned a bachelor\u2019s in applied mathematics and statistics and a master\u2019s in biomedical engineering. He initially thought he\u2019d work with intelligent prosthetics or computer- integrated surgery, but a class in machine learning opened his eyes to the possibilities in that field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Changing majors led him to impactful professors such as Carey Priebe<\/a>, director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science; Avanti Athreya<\/a>, associate research professor; and Joshua Vogelstein<\/a>, associate professor of biomedical engineering. In Vogelstein\u2019s neuro data design class, Duderstadt says students had to create a \u201cbaby startup\u201d and he learned how to develop applications and translate research to development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duderstadt still publishes research in conjunction with Priebe\u2019s lab and aims to produce an associated research paper anytime Nomic publishes a new model. It fits with his mission of keeping AI available and approachable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA lot of the Nomic ethos is building AI in a way that is open, accessible, and explainable to everybody, and a big part of that is communication of results,\u201d he says. \u201cBeyond that, we try to push the envelope in research fields that we think are important.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u2014 MARC SHAPIRO<\/p>\n\n\n\n

illustration by Joe Kimmel<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Co-founder of Nomic AI, Brandon Duderstadt, Engr \u201918,\u201919 (MSE) has produced some of the world\u2019s most popular AI products.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":50327,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"issue":[42],"class_list":["post-50030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-changemakers","issue-spring-2025"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAn Eager Disrupter - Johns Hopkins Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine\/changemakers\/eager-disruptter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"An Eager Disrupter - 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