Noah Shunn, 23: Reflexion Author Who Beat GPT-4 on HumanEval, Now Agent Pioneer at Sierra
vaibhavbetter · x · 2026-09-29
Noah Shunn is only 23, yet at 20 he co-wrote Reflexion—one of the earliest papers on AI agents learning from their own mistakes—hitting 91% on HumanEval vs GPT-4's 80% and landing in NeurIPS. Coauthor Shunyu Yao is now Tencent's chief AI scientist.
With prior research in computational photochemistry and avionics and 10,000+ citations, Shunn dropped out in 2023 to join Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor's agent company Sierra as one of its first employees, where he again teamed with Yao to build τ-bench, a benchmark for agents handling real customer tasks.
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