Luma AI Hires Matthew Tancik

In another shocking move, Luma AI has announced the hiring of NeRF founding co-author as well as nerfstudio co-founder Matthew Tancik.

When it comes to NeRFs, there are few names, if any, within the industry that are larger than Matt Tancik. He has continually produced more NeRF innovation since the seminal paper and is unquestionably an industry expert.

In addition to the original NeRF paper, Tancik has also co-authored papers such as LERF, Instruct-NeRF2NeRF, and MIP-NeRF. He also recently gave a talk at MIT about NeRFs and nerfstudio.

Matt is the most recent nerfstudio team member to head to Luma, joining his advisor Professor Angjoo Kanazawa. Just like Professor Kanazawa, Tancik has history working with Luma Co-Founder Alex Yu on papers such as PlenOctrees and Plenoxels.

It remains to be seen whether this is a full time departure from nerfstudio for Tancik or if he will remain a contributor to the platform. There is some precedent though with Professor Kanazawa annoucing nerfstudio's presence at SIGGRAPH, despite her role at Luma. Tancik could previously been found answering countless threads and questions within the nerfstudio Discord.

Regardless, this marks a massive hire for the Luma team and shows that the Luma team is here to build the strongest team within the industry as possible.