David Herel profile picture

David Herel

Co-Founder & AI Researcher, BottleCap AI
dherel@bottlecapai.com

Hi, I’m David. I’m a co-founder and AI researcher at BottleCap AI, where we work on making large language models dramatically faster and cheaper to train and run.

I also co-founded Hive Spirit Technologies with Tomas Mikolov, building language models for algorithmic trading on stock markets. My research is in artificial intelligence and language models, including several first-author notable papers (ICLR, ECAI, Amazon Science, ALIFE). I extended my work on Thinking Tokens and LLM reasoning at NUS and was a finalist in Amazon’s Alexa Prize.

Selected experience

  1. 2025–present Co-Founder & AI Researcher, BottleCap AI. Co-founded BottleCap AI with Tomas Mikolov and Jaroslav Beck. BottleCap raised a $7.5M seed round led by 20VC and is building efficiency-first language models.
  2. 2025 Research internship, National University of Singapore. Research internship with Prof. Michael Shieh, extending my work on Thinking Tokens for LLM reasoning.
  3. 2024–present Co-Founder, Hive Spirit Technologies. Built language-model-driven algorithmic trading systems with Tomas Mikolov for stock markets.
  4. 2022–2025 PhD research, CTU/CIIRC. PhD research under Tomas Mikolov at CTU/CIIRC, focused on language models. First-author of several notable papers (ICLR, ECAI, Amazon Science, ALIFE).
  5. 2022 – 2023 Amazon Alexa Prize finalist, Alquist AI. Built open-domain conversational AI for the Socialbot Grand Challenge 5; the team reached the finals and placed 3rd.

Talks, interviews & press

YORD Beyond Reality Podcast thumbnail Can Europe Win the AI Race? YORD / Beyond Reality Podcast · 2026 Long-form conversation on efficient AI, model collapse, model bias, and Europe’s role in frontier AI. BottleCap AI launch press photo BottleCap AI launch Forbes · 2025 Coverage of BottleCap AI’s $7.5M seed round and mission to build more efficient language models. GoodMeetup talk thumbnail GoodMeetup #8: The Full Stack of AI GoodData · 2025 Panel on the modern AI stack with BottleCap AI, Qdrant, Macaly, and GoodData. Moderni Stack talk thumbnail Language models and artificial intelligence Moderní Stack · 2023 Talk on language models, intelligence, and the trajectory of AI systems. AI Association interview photo AI researcher David Herel Czech AI Association · 2023 Interview on language models, research, and how AI is changing software and work. AI explainer media thumbnail Artificial intelligence is already everyday technology ČTK / Forbes · 2024 Expert commentary on how language models are entering everyday technology.

Notable publications

Diagram from Collapse of self-trained language models
Collapse of self-trained language models David Herel and Tomas Mikolov ICLR 2024 notable.
Alquist 5.0: Dialogue Trees Meet Generative Models. A Novel Approach for Enhancing SocialBot Conversations Ondrej Kobza, Jan Cuhel, Tommaso Gargiani, David Herel, Petr Marek, Jan Pichl, Jakub Konrad, Petr Lorenc and Jan Sedivy Amazon Science 2023.
On Difficulties of Attention Factorization through Shared Memory Uladzislau Yorsh, Martin Holeňa, Ondřej Bojar, David Herel ICLR 2023.
Preserving Semantics in Textual Adversarial Attacks David Herel and Hugo Cisneros and Tomas Mikolov ECAI 2023.
Thinking Tokens for Language Modeling David Herel and Tomas Mikolov AITP 2023.
Emergence of Novelty in Evolutionary Algorithms David Herel and Dominika Zogatova and Matej Kripner and Tomas Mikolov ALIFE 2022.