Jim Fan

NVIDIA Senior Research Manager, GR00T & Foundation Agent Research

Jim Fan

Home > People > Jim Fan

Profile

FieldDetails
Current PositionNVIDIA Senior Research Manager
TeamGEAR Lab (Generalist Embodied Agent Research)
PhDStanford University
AdvisorFei-Fei Li
Social MediaActive AI communicator (100K+ followers)

Key Contributions

  • GR00T: NVIDIA’s humanoid robot foundation model
  • Voyager: LLM-based autonomous Minecraft agent
  • MineDojo: Minecraft-based AI benchmark
  • Foundation Agent Vision: Pioneered direction for general-purpose agent research

Research Timeline

Stanford PhD (2016-2022)

Advised by Fei-Fei Li

YearWorkImpact
2018Video UnderstandingVideo comprehension research
2021MineDojoMinecraft AI benchmark, NeurIPS Outstanding Paper
2022PhD Graduation

NVIDIA (2022-present)

GEAR Lab Founding & Leadership

YearWorkImpact
2022Joined NVIDIAFounded GEAR Lab
2023VoyagerLLM + Minecraft autonomous exploration
2023EurekaLLM-generated reward functions
2024GR00THumanoid foundation model
2025GR00T N1Open humanoid VLA

Major Publications

Foundation Agent

  • Voyager (2023) - LLM-based autonomous Minecraft agent
  • MineDojo (NeurIPS 2022 Outstanding Paper) - Minecraft AI benchmark
  • Eureka (2023) - Automatic reward function generation with LLMs

Robotics

  • GR00T (GTC 2024) - Humanoid foundation model
  • GR00T N1 (2025) - Open humanoid VLA

Key Ideas

Voyager (2023)

Core: LLM writes code to autonomously explore Minecraft

Components:
1. Automatic Curriculum - LLM proposes next goals
2. Skill Library - Store/reuse discovered skills
3. Iterative Prompting - LLM fixes code on failure

Results:
- Crafted diamond tools without human intervention
- 3.3x faster skill acquisition than previous methods

Impact:

  • Pioneered LLM + game agent research
  • Set direction for LLM utilization in Embodied AI

GR00T (2024)

Core: General-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots

Architecture:
- Dual-system (System 1 + System 2)
- VLM + Diffusion Transformer
- Large-scale synthetic data utilization

Features:
- Natural language understanding
- Human motion imitation
- Support for various humanoids

Impact:

  • First open humanoid foundation model (N1)
  • Core of NVIDIA’s robotics ecosystem

GEAR Lab Vision

Foundation Agent

Goal: One agent performing various tasks in various environments

Games (Minecraft) -> Simulation (Isaac) -> Real Robots

Key:
- Leverage LLM reasoning capabilities
- Large-scale training in simulation
- Support for various embodiments

Integration with NVIDIA Strategy

  • Isaac Sim: Simulation environment
  • Omniverse: Synthetic data generation
  • Jetson: Edge computing
  • GR00T: Foundation model

Philosophy & Direction

Research Philosophy

“Agents that succeed in games can succeed in the real world. Generality is the key.”

Research Direction

  1. 2016-2021: Video understanding, MineDojo
  2. 2022-2023: LLM + games (Voyager, Eureka)
  3. 2024-present: Humanoid robotics (GR00T)

Communication & Influence

Active Social Media Presence

  • Twitter/X: 100K+ followers
  • AI research commentary, vision sharing
  • Industry news curation

Public Outreach

  • Explains complex AI research accessibly
  • Discusses AI research directions
  • Model for researcher-public communication

Awards & Recognition

  • NeurIPS 2022 Outstanding Paper (MineDojo)
  • Stanford AI Lab alumnus

See Also