Alex Mathew

Alex is 17 and heading to UC Berkeley this fall after graduating from Alpha High School in Austin. When ChatGPT swept through his school and classmates started turning to it for emotionally intimate problems, he watched it make things worse, not better. So he talked to thousands of teens and built Berry, a talking stuffed animal designed for teen mental health (he also tried building in a brain-computer interface to read brainwaves, which he'll tell you did not go over well). The process taught him to trade certainty for humility, and to treat trust as something built rather than requested.

He recently learned through therapy that his brain isn't neurotypical, and it's reshaped how he thinks about AI: he wants to study the neurotypical bias baked into how these systems are trained, and to explore what he calls "soul" — the parts of being human that can't be automated. He's the youngest of this cohort and among the most emotionally direct, describing his hope for a fellowship built on unconditional acceptance rather than professional credentials.