After the meeting between the 9X in the "brain" of Google and the director of a domestic university

Dr. Pham Hy Hieu (born in 1992), a former student of the Gifted High School, a technical member at xAI (USA), is one of the first scientists to be approved for the visiting professor program at Ho Chi Minh City National University.

Regarding becoming a visiting professor at Ho Chi Minh City National University, Dr. Pham Hy Hieu shared that at the end of 2024, when he returned to Vietnam, he had the opportunity to meet Associate Professor Dr. Vu Hai Quan, Director of this university.

After the meeting between the 9X in Google's brain and the director of a domestic university - 1

Dr. Pham Hy Hieu (Photo: VNUHCM).

During the intimate dinner, Professor Quan shared the goals of the National University's Visiting Professor program. Dr. Pham Hy Hieu realized that the program would create conditions for him to contribute to the school.

Becoming a visiting professor at the National University, Dr. Nguyen Hy Hieu wants to share his research and working experience with the university's lecturers and students, as well as listen to them about practical issues in Vietnam's AI environment.

Specifically, in his role as visiting professor, Dr. Nguyen Hy Hieu has two main goals, including:

The first is to create conditions for students to be exposed to the latest and most practical research directions in AI.

AI research requires an extremely large amount of investment capital. Dr. Hieu gave an example, a machine with 8 modern AI chips in 2025 will be sold for 500,000 USD and we usually need tens of thousands of such machines to be able to create an AI like DeepSeek.

With this amount of capital, not onlyeducational institutions in Vietnam but also major institutes in the world such as Cambridge, Stanford, or MIT, have no way to access this source of capital. So how can we participate in these research directions?

Dr. Hieu's answer is that we must see how to conduct research at a smaller scale but must look closely to ensure that our observations and contributions at a small scale are still valuable at a large scale.

He wanted to share with students how to spot such small-scale studies and guide them through doing some research in that direction.

Second, I want to find out what difficulties and challenges AI research at VNU-HCM often encounters. Do you lack investment capital, lack of research output, or lack of direction, or a combination of the above problems, or something else?

Through studying these issues, combined with his expertise, Dr. Hieu hopes to help AI research at Ho Chi Minh City National University develop further.

In 2015, Dr. Pham Hy Hieu graduated with honors in computer science from Stanford University, USA and was awarded the Ben Wegbreit Prize for the best honorary thesis.

He then received his PhD in machine learning and computational linguistics from Carnegie Mellon University, USA, where he was the first student to receive full tuition and computing infrastructure funding from Google Brain.

He worked at Google Brain from 2020 to 2023 as a researcher and also held the position of Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, National University of Singapore (April 2021 to March 2023).

He was also voted one of Forbes Vietnam's 30 Under 30 in 2019.

Dr. Pham Hy Hieu is currently a technical member at xAI, USA (AI company founded by billionaire Elon Musk). Here, he participates in optimizing attention kernels for the Grok-3 model.

Previously, Dr. Hieu was a researcher at Augment Computing Company (March 2023-July 2024), making an important contribution to bringing the company from the start-up stage to a valuation of 1 billion USD.

Some personal achievements of Pham Hy Hieu:

- Full Undergraduate and Master's Scholarships from Stanford University

- Graduated from Stanford University with honors

- Best Computer Science Thesis Award, Class of 2015, Stanford University

- Full PhD Scholarship from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

- Invited to work by Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google

- Participate in deep learning technology research at Baidu

- Stanford representative at the ACM ICPC international programming contest (2014)

- Silver medal in the Northwest Pacific Regional Programming Contest (2012, 2013, 2014)

- Silver medal of International Mathematical Olympiad (2009)

- Gold medal in Mathematics Olympiad 30/4 (2008)

- Gold medal for individuals and teams in the International Primary Mathematics Olympiad (2004)