Liquid AI, the MIT-spinout building a non-transformer AI architecture for edge and physical deployment, has added one of the most consequential infrastructure builders in modern computing to its advisory bench. Ion Stoica, UC Berkeley professor and co-founder of Databricks, Anyscale, and Chatbot Arena (now LMArena), has joined the company as a strategic member of its Advisory Council.

The man who built the AI infrastructure stack

If you have ever run a Spark job, scaled a distributed training workload with Ray, or checked a model's Elo score on Chatbot Arena, you have used something Ion Stoica helped build. He co-founded three companies: Anyscale in 2019, Databricks in 2013, and Conviva in 2006. He transformed the open-source projects Spark and Ray into successful AI infrastructure companies. More recently, Chatbot Arena emerged from UC Berkeley's Sky Computing Lab, led by a group of graduate students and faculty including professors Joseph Gonzalez and Ion Stoica.

After its latest financing round, the valuation of AI data platform Databricks exceeded $100 billion, making it expected to become the fourth most highly valued AI unicorn globally. In addition to Databricks, Stoica co-founded the AI managed computing platform Anyscale with a valuation of $1 billion, LMArena with a valuation of $600 million, and the video-stream analysis technology company Conviva with a valuation of $300 million. That is a remarkable track record for someone who has never left his Berkeley professorship.

His research fingerprints are all over the modern AI stack. His area of research sits at the intersection between AI and systems, cloud computing, and distributed systems. His founding team at Inferact includes Stoica, who is currently the director of UC Berkeley's Sky Computing Lab, which developed the original version of vLLM in 2023. vLLM is now one of the most widely used inference engines in production deployments.