Just In: NLP Pioneer and Stanford Professor Manning Takes Academic Leave to Join Venture Capital Firm as Partner}
Stanford NLP expert and former AI Lab director Christopher Manning has left academia to join AIX Ventures as a partner, focusing on AI startup investments and innovation.
Previously collaborating with AIX Ventures as a part-time investor since 2021, Manning now dedicates himself full-time to advising the company.
He confirmed on X (formerly Twitter): "I have joined AIX Ventures as a general partner, focusing on investing in deep AI startups. Looking forward to working with founders to tackle AI challenges and witnessing innovative products emerge!"
Shaun Johnson, founding partner of AIX Ventures, commented: "All top AI engineers know Chris, and they all want to work with him."
Leading Figure in NLP
Professor Manning is an early pioneer in applying deep learning to NLP, with renowned research in word vectors (GloVe), attention mechanisms, machine translation, question answering, self-supervised pretraining, recursive neural networks, reasoning, dependency parsing, sentiment analysis, and summarization.
He also focuses on computational linguistics methods for parsing, natural language reasoning, and multilingual processing, aiming to enable computers to understand and generate human language intelligently.
Professor Manning earned his bachelor's degree at Australian National University and his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1994. Since 1999, he has been teaching at Stanford, serving as the first Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Linguistics, Director of Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), and Associate Director of Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). In 2023, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam for his key contributions to NLP.
He co-authored textbooks on statistical NLP (Manning and Schütze, 1999) and information retrieval (Manning, Raghavan, and Schütze, 2008), as well as linguistic monographs on part-of-speech and complex predicates. His "Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing" is a standard textbook in the field, widely read by students. His Stanford CS224N course videos on NLP and deep learning have been viewed by hundreds of thousands.
Over his 20+ years of teaching, Manning has trained many outstanding talents in computer science, including students from China such as Chen Danqi and Wang Mengqiu.
He has been elected ACM Fellow, AAAI Fellow, and ACL Fellow, served as ACL President in 2015, and received awards including ACL, Colin, EMNLP, and CHI best paper awards, as well as the IEEE Neumann Medal in 2024. Manning remains highly attentive to cutting-edge trends in AI research.
In 2022, Manning published "Human Language Understanding & Reasoning" in the AAAS journal AI & Society special issue, discussing semantics, language understanding, and future prospects of large models.
"With breakthroughs in NLP, we may have taken a firm step toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)."
In 2023, Manning participated in and published multiple studies related to large models.
His transition marks his move from academic research to deeper involvement in AI startups and investments. His joining will bring rich experience in NLP and deep AI to AIX Ventures and support innovative AI projects with valuable guidance.