2026 Summer Intern - AI/ML Intern - Vision Language Model/Action (Masters)

Description

To help facilitate administration of relocation benefits if you are selected, please apply using the permanent address you would move from.

Work Arrangement:
Hybrid: This internship is categorized as hybrid. The selected intern is expected to report to the office up to three times per week or as determined by the team.

Locations:

San Francisco, California

Sunnyvale, California

Mountain View, California

About the Team:

The AI Research organization is dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art in AI for autonomous vehicles. We are a collaborative, forward-thinking group of researchers and engineers tackling some of the most complex challenges in autonomy and machine learning.

About the Role:
As a VLM/VLA Research Intern on the AI Research team, you will operate at the frontier of Embodied AI, developing foundational models that bridge the gap between high-level reasoning and physical execution. Your work will focus on advancing vision-language-action architectures to solve critical challenges in data mining and end-to-end autonomous driving. This role offers a unique opportunity to work on real-world AI/ML systems at scale, collaborating with and receiving mentorship from world-class researchers to shape the future of grounded foundation models in the autonomous vehicle industry.

What You'll Do:

• Drive the development of embodied foundation models and vision-language-action architectures that unify multimodal perception with robotic control.

• Prototype and refine ML models that leverage VLA architectures to improve decision-making and reasoning for autonomous vehicles through imitation and reinforcement learning.

• Utilize vision-language models and generative techniques (such as world models) to improve the model's understanding of complex driving scenarios.

• Partner with perception, robotics, and systems engineering teams to integrate VLA research into the broader autonomous stack and validate models in closed-loop environments.

• Engage in high-level technical brainstorming, share insights across the AI Research org, and contribute to the academic community through top-tier conference publications.

• Currently pursuing or in the process of obtaining a Masters in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, or a related technical field.

• Solid understanding of modern machine learning techniques, especially deep learning architectures (e.g., transformers, LLMs, VLMs, generative models, multimodal learning).

• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.

• Research experience in AI/ML, demonstrated through coursework, academic projects, or publications.

• Strong problem-solving skills and a collaborative mindset.

• Strong communication and presentation skills.

• Experience working and communicating cross functionally in a team environment.

• Able to work fulltime, 40 hours per week

• Familiarity with autonomous vehicles or advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

• Experience working with large-scale datasets and training ML models in high-performance computing environments.

• Experience adapting foundation models (VLM/VLAs, diffusion, instruction-following agents) for embodied control tasks.

• Intent to return to degree program after the completion of the internship/co-op

• Proven track record of achieving significant results as demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, as well as first-authored publications at leading workshops or conferences such as NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, ECCV, RSS, ICRA, CoRL, or similar.

• Demonstrated experience and self-driven motivation in solving analytical problems using quantitative approaches

• Experience building systems based on machine learning, reinforcement learning and/or deep learning methods

• The monthly salary range for this role is $10,600 per month

• GM will provide a one-time lump sum taxable stipend payment to eligible students selected for the 2026 Student Program.

• Paid US GM Holidays

• GM Family First Vehicle Discount Program

• Result-based potential for growth within GM

• Intern events to network with company leaders and peers