I am the Founding Engineer at Optica Industries, building the next American Metal Factory. We are backed by Lightspeed, SV Angel, & Neo.

Previously, I worked on Humanoids at Persona AI & researched Video Understanding at Sieve Data to power Petabyte-scale video datasets for Frontier AI Labs.

I am interested in World Modelling and JEPAs, advised by Vivek Boominathan, Randall Balesteiero, & Ashok Veeraraghavan. Before this, I've researched at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Ajayan Group at Rice, and IIT Guwahati.

Here are some things I believe. I also like to read and write about things that interest me.

Research

Essays

Outside of work I sail, paint, and hike. Currently based in San Francisco.

I am easy to reach — please say hi at ahitagnis [at] gmail [dot] com or grab a time. Most of my technical work lives on GitHub and Google Scholar. I sometimes post on X and LinkedIn.