22-Year-Old Innovators Reject Musk's Millions to Build Revolutionary AI That Outperforms Industry Giants

Nov 30, 2025 03:32 pm CST

Two 22-year-old computer scientists from Michigan created Sapient Intelligence after declining Elon Musk's multimillion-dollar offer. Their Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) has outperformed systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek with just 27 million parameters by employing a unique architecture that mimics human thinking rather than statistical prediction, demonstrating superior performance in complex reasoning tasks.