Olivier Couthaud

About

I'm Olivier. I grew up in the south of France with an American mom, so English and French are both native.

I studied computer science at RIT, in the accelerated BS/MS programme, and ran its AI Club. In January 2026 I left to build full time. Since then I've freelanced on AI projects and built a long list of things, most of them from a question I couldn't leave alone.

Lately that has pulled me toward hardware: drones that cope with failure, a printed plane, a heartbeat sensor, rooms turned into 3D models. I still write plenty of software, and I'm happy in either.

I take photographs too, and they live here.

Languages
Python, TypeScript, Rust, C, Dart, Java
ML
PyTorch, JAX, reinforcement learning (PPO, SAC), RAG, MCP
Simulation, 3D
MuJoCo, COLMAP, Blender, nerfstudio, 3D printing
Systems
FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Docker, Linux, GCP, Firebase
Languages, human
English and French, both native
Looking for
Full-time or internship, software or hardware. France, EU, remote, US.

Timeline

2024 → now
202520262024StudyWorkSoftwareHardware, 3DRIT, computer science (BS/MS)Freelance AI consulting beginsLeave RIT to build full timeSimu-VerseVOSVPokerJarviusVibeOSMTG AIBalatroAIFault-tolerant quadrotorGaussian splatsHeartbeatIDdrone-rlEngine simHouse23DPicoTalontoday

Software and workHardware and 3DStudy

Bars show roughly when each project was active. Approximate.

Oct 2026

Engine sound simulator

A Rust simulator of gas flow through an engine's intake and exhaust, turned into sound. Runs in a browser. Still in progress.

Oct 2026

PicoTalon

A 905 mm RC plane, 3D printed in pieces. Assembled and waiting on its electronics; it has not flown yet.

Oct 2026

House23D

Rooms rebuilt as measured Blender models from video and photos, plus a printable 1:100 version.

Aug 2026

HeartbeatID

Identifying people from their ECG. About 92% top-1 on 10 held-out people, tested on a different day.

Jun 2026

V

A personal assistant that decides when to stay quiet, with a harness that refuses to report numbers it cannot support.

Jun 2026

Gaussian splats

Phone video to 3D scenes, on a rented GPU for about $0.40 a run.

May 2026

Fault-tolerant quadrotor

Reinforcement-learning drone control in simulation that copes with a weakened rotor.

Apr 2026

MTG AI

A Magic engine where an LLM was meant to turn card text into rules once; a PPO agent plays it.

Mar 2026

drone-rl

Quadrotor navigation with deep RL, 8,633 steps per second on one GPU.

Feb 2026

IBM Dev Day hackathon

Led a team of four building MCP tools that diagnose and fix a broken app.

Jan 2026

Left RIT to build full time

Stopped the computer science BS/MS to work on projects and freelance.

Sep 2025

VOS

A multi-agent virtual OS with Roman Slack: Python backend, Flutter frontend, agent memory.

Jun 2025

Freelance AI consulting

Six client projects, including a finance research agent and a retrieval-based assistant for an enterprise client. 5/5 on Wyzant.

Feb 2025

Jarvius

My first agent system: a personal assistant on Gemini with multi-agent orchestration.

Sep 2024

Started at RIT

Computer science, accelerated BS/MS. President of the RIT AI Club.