I’m a graduate student and I’ve been working on an interesting side project: building brain inspired modular neural nets. I’m not doing this under the purview of a professor, but there are some interesting preliminary results.
Generally, is it the sort of thing I should just share as a White paper or try to formally publish. Or should I just share a blog post about it
Many journals are fine if you post something on a blog or a 'working paper' on an open site like arxiv while you put it through the peer review process.
if you are doing something that is timely, be aware that academic journals can take over a year to go through the peer review + revision process (months to hear back, month to revise, months to hear back, scheduled for several issues ahead -- not uncommon).
you're definitely better off having gone through the other side, though -- even if the paper doesn't turn out to spread virally (most ideas, even good ones, don't) -- the validation of the academic review can stay with you + your CV.
If you can't find a local professor whom you can trust and who is willing to help (which you should try first), you might want to ask on r/MachineLearning. Many users there are grad students / researchers working in ML/AI, and I've seen someone in a similar situation (asking for endorsement to submit on arXiv) received help.
Also, there's some expense involved. When I wrote papers I had an employer that paid my way to conferences. That is no longer the case. Journals don't require the same expenses, unless you want your work to be available through open access rather than locked into a single issue that will be read by maybe three people, ever. Open access usually costs the author money, meaning it's not really open.
For my next publications, I'm not going to go the academic route. It looks good on the CV but otherwise doesn't serve my purposes. YMMV of course but think about what you want before committing to an approach that these days appears to be designed more to boost the publication credits of academics than to actually spread knowledge.
If you’re a masters student with no intention of serious further academic activity then it doesn’t matter much, arXiv + blog post seems reasonable.
If you're not planning to spend more time on it, and are just looking to share your interesting preliminary results, then a whitepaper might be the way to go. But if you have the time and believe your design has potential then it may likely be worth pursuing. Who knows, maybe some of us will be reading about it a year or two from now.