A LinkedIn post by 22-year-old Adithya S Kolavi has gone viral, drawing widespread attention across the technology community for its remarkable summary of achievements over the past year. Many professionals and researchers have described it as one of the most inspiring Gen Z journeys in artificial intelligence shared online in recent times.
Adithya’s post, which has garnered over 2,000 likes and hundreds of comments, outlines a year marked by global internships, research breakthroughs, open-source success and startup innovation — all achieved soon after completing his undergraduate degree.
From Apple to Microsoft Research
Adithya began the year with a Machine Learning internship at Apple, where he worked closely with senior engineers on advanced projects that helped sharpen his technical and research direction. He later joined Microsoft Research, contributing to work on agentic memory, an emerging area in artificial intelligence focused on intelligent, self-directed systems.
These experiences placed him at the intersection of industry-scale engineering and frontier research, a combination that many young researchers aspire to but rarely achieve so early in their careers.
Meta grant and startup milestone
One of the most significant highlights of Adithya’s year was securing a six-figure USD LLaMA Impact Grant from Meta. The funding enabled him to build frontier-level AI models at his startup, CognitiveLab, positioning the venture within the global open AI research ecosystem.
The grant is awarded to a limited number of teams worldwide and is seen as a strong endorsement of both technical capability and research vision.
Open-source impact and growing following
Adithya’s open-source contributions also gained major traction in 2025. His projects crossed 10,000 GitHub stars, with his visualisation tool GitVizz being accepted into the Vercel Open Source Sponsorship Program.
Across platforms such as LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter) and GitHub, he built a combined following of nearly 20,000 people, helping him connect with researchers, founders and engineers across continents.
Strong academic research record
Alongside industry and startup work, Adithya published five research papers in top-tier academic venues and workshops, including AAAI, NAACL, CVPR, ICCV and NeurIPS. His research spans agentic systems, multimodal multilingual models and large-scale data synthesis, areas that are increasingly shaping the future of AI.
Balancing peer-reviewed research with startup execution and open-source development has drawn particular admiration from academics and practitioners alike.
Hackathons, products and recognition
Adithya also launched Vibemotion, a motion-graphics tool that crossed 200,000 views, and won three major hackathons, including the ElevenLabs Global Hackathon and the 100xEngineers National AI Hackathon.
A recent B.Tech graduate from PES University, Bengaluru, he has already been featured in prominent publications such as The Economic Times, MIT Technology Review, and Analytics India Magazine.
‘Just getting started’
Concluding his viral post, Adithya wrote a line that has resonated widely: “Feels like things are just getting started.”
For many young technologists and students in Karnataka and beyond, his journey has become a powerful reminder of what focused learning, open collaboration and persistence can achieve in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.
As India’s technology ecosystem continues to produce globally competitive talent, stories like Adithya’s highlight the growing role of young innovators from Indian universities in shaping the future of artificial intelligence.