Former CEEM postdoctoral research scientist Dr. Qing “Will” Yin has launched Visko, an AI startup developing real-time models designed to simulate and interact with dynamic environments. The company's 16-person team draws from Apple, Google DeepMind, Meta, Amazon, and Tesla, and is advised by Michael I. Jordan of the University of California, Berkeley; Steve WaiChing Sun of Columbia University; and academic partner, Mengye Ren of New York University. The company recently announced a $10 million pre-seed funding round alongside the launch of its first model, Orbis. Visko's models belong to a class the company calls Live Models — models that run rather than render. Orbis generates video continuously and in real time. Users can change the prompt at any moment during generation and see the update reflected instantly while the video keeps streaming. The technology has potential applications across robotics, physical simulation, gaming, education, and creative media.
Will graduate from Stanford in 2020 and receive his postdoctoral training from 2020 to 2022 under the tutelage of Prof. WaiChing Sun. Will then joined Apple as a research engineer and founded Visko in 2025.
Yin’s engineering background has shaped Visko’s approach to artificial intelligence. Yin’s transition from engineering research to entrepreneurship highlights the diverse career opportunities available to CEEM graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. CEEM congratulates Will Yin on this exciting achievement and looks forward to following Visko’s continued growth!
Reference:
[1] Gao, Xiangbo, Siyuan Yang, Ping He, Mingyang Wu, Yuheng Wu, Yushen Zuo, Jiongze Yu et al. "Visko orbis 1.0: A live model for real-time interactive long video generation." arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.26694 (2026).
