Arjun Desai
Co-founder of Cartesia; co-author of Llamba, distilled recurrent language models
Arjun Desai is a co-founder of Cartesia, a company whose founding team met as PhD students at the Stanford AI Lab while working on state space models. Desai is a co-author of Llamba, a family of recurrent language models distilled from Llama 3.x into the Mamba architecture.132
Career
Cartesia's company page lists Desai as a co-founder, alongside CEO Karan Goel, Chief Scientist Albert Gu and Brandon Yang, and says the founding team met as PhD students at the Stanford AI Lab.1
Research
Desai co-authored "Llamba: Scaling Distilled Recurrent Models for Efficient Language Processing" (2025) with Aviv Bick, Tobias Katsch, Nimit Sohoni and Albert Gu. The paper distils Llama 3.x models into the Mamba architecture using the MOHAWK method and provides an implementation for resource-constrained devices; Cartesia's research page lists it among the company's papers.32
Work
Llamba: Scaling Distilled Recurrent Models for Efficient Language Processing (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
Co-author of the 2025 paper introducing Llamba-1B, 3B and 8B, recurrent models distilled from Llama 3.x into the Mamba architecture, with an implementation aimed at smartphones and edge devices.32
Career timeline
Feb 2025
Co-authored the Llamba paper on distilled recurrent language models.3
Related people
More sourced profiles at the same organization, in the same field, or from the same school.
- Albert GuAlso at Cartesia
- Azalia MirhoseiniAlso from Stanford
- Abigail SeeAlso from Stanford
- Brandon YangAlso at Cartesia
- BartowskiInference and serving
- Abubakar AbidAlso from Stanford
- Karan GoelAlso at Cartesia
- Eric HartfordLanguage models
- Andrej KarpathyAlso from Stanford
- Furu WeiLanguage models
- Andrew NgAlso from Stanford
- Krithik PuthalathLanguage models
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