SUNNY LIU

Making minds and machines interpretable.

I'm interested in where cognitive and artificial architectures overlap.

I'm a builder, storyteller, and researcher, usually somewhere between prototyping, overthinking, and shipping.

I was born in Chongqing and grew up on the beaches of Vancouver. Currently, I'm an undergrad at Columbia in New York City. So far I've been an actress, a content creator, and a partner at an edtech startup that recently got acquired.

I build a lot and dabble in a bit of everything, UI, backend, product strat, usually somewhere between prototyping, overthinking, and shipping. What I hyperfocus on is AI and computational neuroscience. I want to understand how the brain works using computational models (deep nets especially).

Right now I'm continuing that work at the Kriegeskorte Lab.

Sunny Liu
PRACTICE
Work
Spider AI
now
A browser and browser engine built for AI agents, designed for speed and token efficiency.
Spider's goal is to let an agent read, query and act on live websites with far fewer tokens and far less time than driving a conventional browser, at equal or better accuracy.
Capital V Strategies
AI & Tech Lead · Jun 2026 - Sep 2026
Shipped 3 AI tools and agents, including a media database of 20k+ reporters.
Coconote, AI Notetaker
Growth Lead & Partner · Jun 2025 - Dec 2025
1 of 3 partners at a top-30 education app, acquired by Quizlet.
Lifted viewer retention 30% in 4 months across the flagship creator channel (15M+ views).
Research
Kriegeskorte Lab, Columbia
Research Assistant · Aug 2026 - now
Modeling human perception with AI vision models, with Dr. Fan Cheng.
Columbia Business School
CUBS Scholar · Sep 2026 - now
Simulated research participants, with Prof. Wei Cai.
NLP research measuring organizational capital and customer service quality from corporate data.
Education
Columbia University, Columbia College
BA in AI and Cognitive Science and Business Management · expected May 2027
GPA 3.97, Dean's List all semesters.
Coursework in AI, NLP, cognitive neuroscience, computational models of decision-making, and data structures in Java.
Elsewhere
Programming
Python, PyTorch, Java, SQL, R, Stata, JavaScript, React, HTML, Git
Tools
Google Colab, MATLAB, Jupyter Notebooks, LangChain, Overleaf
Languages
English (native), Mandarin Chinese (native)
NOW
  • 01Building Spider AI.
  • 02Researching human perception and AI at the Kriegeskorte Lab, Columbia.
  • 03Business school research with Dr. Wei Cai on simulated research participants.
  • 04Working on my senior project in cognitive science, thesis research on visual perception.
THINGS I THINK ABOUT
  • computational theory of mind
  • multiple realizability
  • alienation (marx)
  • first principles thinking
  • isomorphisms
  • simulation theory
  • digital twins
  • simulative agents
  • topology & homomorphisms
  • interpretability
  • representational geometry
  • computational neuroscience
  • poverty of the stimulus
  • neural decoding
  • predictive coding
  • representational similarity analysis