A 17-year-old took home $250,000

The Regeneron Science Talent Search is highly competitive and hands out over $1 million in prizes.
This year's first-place winner, Achyuta Rajaram, won for his project on machine learning.
Rajaram hopes to make computer vision models faster, more accurate, and safer.
Every year, the Society for Science hands out over $1 million to the competition's finalists. This year's winners were announced at a gala on Tuesday, and Rajaram was so surprised he won that a security guard became concerned.

"He was worried that I'd just faint there and then," Rajaram told Business Insider.

The 17-year old Phillips Exeter Academy student created a project around improving the speed and accuracy of computer vision models, which he told Business Insider can function as mysteriously as ChatGPT.This thought process can be broken down into, what are called, circuits — the part of a model responsible for detecting different parameters.

Typically, if you want to find a specific circuit in a computer's brain, you have to do it manually, Rajaram said.

"But this is extremely, extremely impractical, especially as models get bigger to the billions of parameters," he added. So, he built an algorithm to automate the process, for a smarter, faster model. If you ask it a question and it gives you an answer, you don't actually know what happens in between these steps," he said of the chatbot adding that, "problems can lie lurking within these models" that eventually go on to make mistakes.

Understanding more about how an algorithm gets from input to output will not only make it faster but safer, Rajaram said. And since machine learning is the foundation for AI, Rajaram's project could make AI smarter and faster, too.

Beating out 2,000 competitors
Participationin Regeneron Science Talent Search hasgrown and shrunk over the years, reaching its peak in the late 1960s during the Apollo missions. This year had the highest number of applicants since that decade, Maya Ajmera, the Society's president and CEO, told Business Insider.

Scientists and engineers evaluated over 2,000 applications and narrowed them down to the top 300. "These 300 scholars are the top scientists and engineers," Ajmera said. A panel of about 20 then selected the top 40 finalists.
Rajaram plans to continue studying computer science at MIT in the fall. His advice to anyone who wants to apply for the Regeneron Science Talent Search is to "be really, really curious about everything."

That includes subjects outside your chosen field, he said. "I am a personal believer that almost everything is infinitely cool if you go deep enough into it."

Building faster, safer AI
When humans look at an image, a cluster of neurons in your brain will light up in response, Rajaram said. "The same thing happens in these computer vision models."

So how does a computer tell the difference between a car and a cat? If the model is looking at a cat, it might begin by focusing on the ears, nose, and whiskers — key features that distinguish it from a car.