Dave Van Veen

I build AI systems people can trust.

Currently, I'm a research scientist at Google DeepMind on Gemini. My work spans post-training and agentic tool use, with a focus on factuality and grounding.

I write about agentic systems and AI's societal impacts. Away from the computer, you'll find me reading, surfing, or trail running with my dog.

bio

Previously, Dave was a principal AI scientist at a start-up, building the vision-language models behind its first product. He earned his PhD from Stanford under Akshay Chaudhari and John Pauly, developing algorithms for computational imaging and multimodal models. He has published 15+ papers (3000+ citations) across Nature, Nature Medicine, CVPR, ACL, et al.

Prior to his PhD, Dave was a research scientist at a Bay Area start-up and Stanford's AIMI Center. He earned his MS at the University of Texas doing ML research under Alex Dimakis and Sriram Vishwanath, during which he served as a Data Science for Social Good fellow in London. As an undergrad at Wisconsin, he founded Badgerloop, a 150-person team that built a hyperloop pod for SpaceX.