Alex Chen

Santa Clara, CA

I am Alex (Wei) Chen 陈伟, a Director of Engineering at Qualcomm. I joined the team through Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nexa AI, a company I founded with the goal of making generative AI more efficient and accessible on everyday hardware.

At Nexa, our team built the NexaSDK — an open-source toolkit for running AI models on edge devices that found a real home in the developer community. Along the way, we had the chance to work closely with engineering teams at NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Intel, and to deploy with enterprise partners like Geely, HP, Lenovo, and İşbank. I also led research on the Octopus model series, OmniVLM, OmniAudio, and NexaQuant — work focused on making large models smaller and faster without sacrificing capability.

My interests sit at the intersection of AI systems, LLM/VLM inference, hardware-software co-design, and robotics. I’m especially drawn to the question of how we build intelligence that can act in the physical world. I hold a PhD from Stanford University (2024) and a Bachelor’s from Tongji University (2019), and previously served as an Investment Scout at Sequoia Capital.

This blog is where I think out loud about AI, robotics, and the systems behind them. If something sparks a question or a conversation, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

news

Mar 13, 2026	Joined Qualcomm as Director of Engineering following the acquisition of Nexa AI.

latest posts

May 11, 2026	Understanding Kernel Design from a Mathematical Perspective
Apr 13, 2026	Gated Delta Networks: Improving Mamba2 with the Delta Rule
Apr 05, 2026	Universal Manipulation Interface: In-The-Wild Robot Teaching Without In-The-Wild Robots

selected publications

arXiv

AutoNeural: Co-Designing Vision-Language Models for NPU Inference

Wei Chen, Liangmin Wu, Yunhai Hu, and 8 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.02924, 2024

arXiv Bib HTML

@article{chen2024autoneural,
  title = {{AutoNeural}: Co-Designing Vision-Language Models for {NPU} Inference},
  author = {Chen, Wei and Wu, Liangmin and Hu, Yunhai and Li, Zhiyuan and Cheng, Zhiyuan and Qian, Yicheng and Zhu, Lingyue and Hu, Zhipeng and Liang, Luoyi and Tang, Qiang and others},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.02924},
  year = {2024},
}

arXiv

Octopus v2: On-device language model for super agent

Wei Chen and Zhiyuan Li

arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.01744, 2024

arXiv Bib HTML

@article{chen2024octopusv2,
  title = {Octopus v2: On-device language model for super agent},
  author = {Chen, Wei and Li, Zhiyuan},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.01744},
  year = {2024},
}