V Questions with… DAMO Academy’s Dr. Jianyi Meng

Executive Summary

‘V Questions with…’ uncovers the backstory to a RISC-V member’s latest work in five questions. Here, I talk to Dr. Jianyi Meng, Chief Scientist at Alibaba DAMO Academy and Vice Chair of RISC-V Summit China 2026, about what it took to achieve an on-chip AI milestone for RISC-V, and his hopes for next week’s Summit in Shenzen. 2026 has been a defining year for high-performance RISC-V computing.

Artificial Intelligence Architecture & Model Evaluation

From an artificial intelligence architecture, model weights governance, and inference efficiency perspective: - **Weights Accessibility & Sovereignty:** Evaluates whether weights are open for private self-hosting or locked behind centralized cloud APIs. - **Quantization & Edge Performance:** Kernel optimizations (4-bit/8-bit GGUF, AWQ, EXL2) allow high tokens-per-second on consumer GPUs and Apple Silicon. - **Reasoning & Architectural Scaling:** Scrutinizes mixture-of-experts (MoE), attention mechanisms, and fine-tuning datasets against open community benchmarks.

Impact on the Open Ecosystem

Protects developers and enterprises from proprietary black-box entrapment, fostering auditable, sovereign AI infrastructure.