Why did I start this blog?

I just had knee surgery a few days ago, and been sitting here trying to spend my time wisely.

I never really thought the idea of blogging appealed to me. But I’ve started reading some people’s blogs I follow and have come to enjoy reading. I’ve been a bit injured lately with more alone time, so thought having a cool space just to splurge my thoughts would be nice. Some people I follow:

Andrej Karpathy

George Hotz

Jeff Shainline

Lex Fridman

What am I doing with my life?

Honestly I am not really sure. I went to a school on the east coast for undergrad getting a B.S. in Computer Science. Then worked at Microsoft for four years. Now I think I want to go to gradschool, but I am not totally sure.

Right now, I am in this intermediary state where I am getting paid to continue my independent research by the University of Washington and the Allen Institute. I’m interested in recurrent neural networks, and making something that isn’t totally useless.

Sometimes I hear people I meet in my newly-found research community say that they are in it for the research aspect, and they are problem-agnostic to some degree. I am thinking that may not be totally true for me. I feel like I want to work on a specific thing - making RNNs work better. Ultimately I think the reason why I find this inspiring is:

  1. It allows me to introspect about the internal dynamics of the human experience.
  2. I feel like they should work better than they currently do. Biological systems work pretty well.
  3. If it works out, it has real applications.

I feel like I don’t know enough right now to set a good path for myself. The change from a software engineer to a research role has been quite a bit different. There is a lot of context I am missing with respect to research, people in the field, my own preferences, etc.

It seems like where I am going is either:

  1. Pursue a career in pure research, and understanding on how to contribute towards AGI. Likely always stay doing new things. I would definitely need a PhD.
  2. Pursue a career in research towards a financial goal, like finding something monetizable that works well. To do this one would need a PhD, and likely a lot of time doing pure research, starting from scratch over and over again, etc.
  3. Pursue a career in consuming research towards a financial goal. One may not necessarily need a PhD from this, but would stay on top of the current advances and be adept at implementing / scaling ideas from other people’s research.

I am not sure where I am headed. Going for a PhD seems like quite a bit more of a complicated and nuanced objective than I previously assumed.

Thoughts about research so far?

I am having WAY more fun than I did in my past job. It seems nearly everything is better: people, work, creativity, self-management.

It is hard to keep up with all the things I want to do, and I think if I had 10 Andrews in my service I would still not accomplish everything. I’d like a way to mitigate this for myself though. The biggest draw on my time is reading research papers, which conflicts pretty heavily with my implementation heads-down time. I’ve been cutting it out more than I like, and I’d like to build a personal tool to make this part of my job better. I’ve been thinking of writing a pdf summarizer using gpt apis, but have been running into some challenges.

What do I expect to use this blog for?

I expect to post stuff relating to:

  1. My personal journery
  2. Side projects
  3. Random opinions
  4. Research
  5. Hobbies