Aastha Jhunjhunwala

Aastha Jhunjhunwala is a solutions architect at NVIDIA working on foundation-model development, scientific AI, and robotics. Her contributions include the Nemotron-4 language models and GR00T N1, a humanoid foundation model that translates visual observations and language instructions into physical actions.

Jhunjhunwala earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, concentrating on molecular dynamics and machine learning for drug discovery. At NVIDIA, she initially wrote about GPU-accelerated mathematical libraries before expanding into language-model pretraining, inference, and generative AI infrastructure.

She coauthored the 2024 technical reports for Nemotron-4 15B and Nemotron-4 340B, contributing to the latter’s foundation-model team. She also participated in a biochemical foundation-model collaboration involving nach0, which combines natural and chemical language.

• Making specialized models practical. Jhunjhunwala has developed workflows for domain-adaptive pretraining and training a reasoning-capable model on a single GPU. The latter combines curated data, supervised fine-tuning, LoRA adaptation, curriculum learning, and targeted evaluation within an approximately 48-hour training process.

• Cross-embodiment action decoding. In her GR00T N1 architecture explanation, Jhunjhunwala describes how a slower planning system coordinates with faster action generation, processing images, language, and robot-state information through a diffusion-transformer architecture. An embodiment-specific decoder translates shared model representations into movements appropriate to a particular robot body. She contrasts imitation learning’s dependence on expensive demonstrations with reinforcement learning’s difficulty transferring behavior from simulation into physical environments.

• Scientific AI grounded in experimentation. Her work on reasoning models for battery research and AI co-scientists for fusion and cancer research connects specialized language models with simulation, molecular discovery, and expert review. The fusion and cancer projects involve Los Alamos National Laboratory.

More recently, Jhunjhunwala contributed to Nemotron 3 Nano Omni within its evaluation, product, and legal contributor group.