Deric Cheng is Director of Research at Windfall Trust, a nonprofit focused on ensuring that the economic gains from advanced AI are broadly shared, where he leads research on national economic preparedness, with a focus on tax policy, welfare resilience, market design and labor market policy. He also leads the AGI Social Contract, a consortium of experts developing strategies for the design of a new social contract through the coming transition. His central priority is expanding the number of researchers and practitioners working on national preparedness plans.
Previously he was AI Governance Lead at Convergence Analysis, where he convened Threshold 2030, a conference on the economic impacts of AI, and directed fellowships in economic policy research. His earlier work there covered foundational AI governance tools, including chip registries, model registries and the soft nationalization of AI labs. Before moving into policy, he worked as an engineer. He was the fifth software engineer at Alchemy, an Ethereum infrastructure company later valued at $10.2 billion, where he built web3.university, a learning platform used by over 200,000 students. Earlier, at Google's Interaction Lab, he led software explorations for a next-generation Google Glass and independently designed and built the first "Babelfish" real-time translation feature, which launched on the Pixel Buds in 2017. He holds a Bachelors of Science from Princeton University.
