Shivon Alice Zilis (born c. February 8, 1986)^{[better source needed]} is a Canadian venture capitalist who works in the technology and artificial intelligence fields.

Early life and education

Zilis was born in Markham, Ontario, Canada and is of Punjabi Indian and Canadian heritage; she credits her Punjabi immigrant mother for her noted "big" blue eyes.[2] She is an only child and one of her parents is a former federal bureaucrat. Zilis graduated from Markham's Unionville High School. She graduated from Yale University on academic and athletic financial aid in 2008, with degrees in economics and philosophy.[3] She identifies with philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and David Hume.[2] At Yale, she played on the ice hockey team and is credited with one of the all-time best save percentages as a goalkeeper at the school.[3] Outside of athletics, she played the drums and guitar and read literature.[4] Zilis was inspired by a Canadian band called Our Lady Peace to read The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil and has subsequently studied artificial intelligence ever since.[5]

Career

After graduating from Yale, Zilis initially planned to return to Canada but instead started her career at IBM in New York, working in financial technologies in developing countries, especially Peru and Indonesia.[6] From 2012 to 2018, she was one of the founding investors and partner of Bloomberg Beta, funded by Bloomberg L.P., utilizing what she calls "machine intelligence".[7] She is a Fellow at the Creative Destruction Lab (a machine learning incubator at University of Toronto), on the board of Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and a charter member of C100.

She co-hosts an annual conference at the University of Toronto that brings together the foremost authors, academics, founders, and investors in machine intelligence. She was one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in and LinkedIn's 35 Under 35. In 2015, Zilis was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital.[8] Zilis serves as director of operations and special projects at Neuralink and reports directly to Elon Musk.[9] Zilis met Musk through her non-profit work at OpenAI, of which she is currently a board member. Although Musk co-founded OpenAI, as of 2019, he is no longer involved in the organization or its board.[10][11] From 2017 to 2019, she served as a project director for Tesla, Inc.'s Autopilot product and chip design team.[5][11]

Personal life

In July 2022, it was revealed through the obtaining of Travis County, Texas court documents that Zilis had twins with Elon Musk who were born in November 2021.[12] She stated in 2020, that Musk is the person she admires most despite criticism towards him.[11] According to court documents to register the twins' names, Musk and Zilis listed the same address in Austin.[13]

References