Sun Nov 30 07:32:47 UTC 2025: ## Michigan Duo Turns Down Musk’s Millions, Develops Revolutionary AI
ANN ARBOR, MI – Two 22-year-old entrepreneurs from Michigan are making waves in the artificial intelligence field after rejecting a multimillion-dollar acquisition offer from tech mogul Elon Musk. William Chen and Guan Wang, high school friends and co-founders of Sapient Intelligence, opted to remain independent to pursue their groundbreaking Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM).
The duo, who met in Michigan and later attended Tsinghua University in Beijing, believe their new architecture overcomes the limitations of current large-language models (LLMs). Their initial success with OpenChat, a smaller LLM focused on high-quality conversations and self-improvement, attracted significant attention, ultimately leading to Musk’s offer.
However, Chen and Wang declined the offer, choosing to focus on their own vision. Their HRM, boasting only 27 million parameters, has reportedly outperformed leading AI systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek on complex reasoning tasks like advanced Sudoku and the ARC-AGI benchmark. The key, they say, is a two-part recurrent structure that mimics human thought processes, allowing for deliberate reasoning rather than statistical prediction.
“It’s not guessing,” Chen explained in a statement. “It’s thinking.”
According to Sapient Intelligence, the HRM also demonstrates significantly reduced hallucination rates and matches state-of-the-art performance in specialized fields such as weather prediction, quantitative trading, and medical monitoring. The company is planning to open a US office in the near future, signaling their commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI innovation. The young entrepreneurs aim to develop AGI before anyone else.
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