CTO & Co-founder of Nexa AI (acquired by Qualcomm)
personal website → zackli.ai
Website · GitHub · LinkedIn · Twitter/X · zackli4ai@gmail.com
I'm Zack (Zhiyuan) Li, an entrepreneur, builder, and lifelong learner building scalable AI systems from frontier research to robust products. My interests lie in scalable software architecture design, Gen AI inference and Physical AI.
I co-founded Nexa AI (acquired by Qualcomm) as Chief Technology Officer. On the engineering side, we build Nexa SDK (now GenieX), which reached #1 on GitHub Trending and #1 Product of the Day, earned 8k+ GitHub stars, and was featured by Qualcomm, AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and IBM. On the research side, I co-authored the Octopus model series, which trended top-2 on Hugging Face and was featured by Google I/O and Google DeepMind.
After M&A, our team at Qualcomm is building GenieX, a generative AI inference runtime for Qualcomm platforms. I also contribute to llama.cpp.
Before Nexa, I built on-device AI and software systems at Google, Amazon Lab126, and Cadence. I hold an M.S. from Stanford University (2019) and a B.E. from Tongji University (2017).
Selected publications (Google Scholar)
- Octopus v2: On-Device Language Model for Super Agent — arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.01744, 2024
- Octo-planner: On-Device Language Model for Planner-Action Agents — arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.18082, 2024
- On-Device Language Models: A Comprehensive Review — arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.00088, 2024
- AutoNeural: Co-Designing Vision-Language Models for NPU Inference — arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.02924, 2025
