26 karma · joined April 12, 2018
When tokenizing terabytes of text for your training corpus, the speedup here is probably doing real work in saving you time (and money?). You get a faster iteration cycle when figuring out and adjusting your datasets.
I started working on Alki because wrangling and deploying AI models on edge devices felt clunky. Going from a Hugging Face model to something production-ready required too many manual steps. Alki aims to simplify that by offering more conversion options, packaging models into reproducible bundles, and making them easy to publish or run on edge hardware.
Llama.cpp was a great starting point, but it led me down the rabbit hole of building a toolchain that could handle different quantization methods, export formats, and deployment bundles for orchestration.
It’s still early and I’d love feedback from infra engineers and startups running LLMs outside the cloud, especially around packaging formats, performance, and what would make the biggest quality-of-life improvements.
It was an incredibly novel feeling of seeing the room I was in get mapped out, furniture and all, to see interfaces and 3d models rendered in a way that felt interactable in real space. Moving renders of objects around to see how things could be - well, it was just a lot of fun; it felt like playing with a new video game console as a child.
Sure, the overall experience was clunky, with the motion tracking and sub-par lenses constantly reminding you that it was only a prototype, but that first interaction excites you about all the things that could be possible if it actually is refined into a final product. Perhaps this was the same experience that led many of the early investors to put so much faith in Magic Leap while there was still a long road ahead of them.
While I do believe our understanding of how the brain functions still has a long way to go, which includes treatments for mental illness, there is something to be said about acknowledging more the external factors of our modern day lives that fill us with so many problems.
Personally, realizing where I have "disconnected" from people, values, and truly human experiences has been a large step forward in improving my mental health. I hope it's something that others who feel so many emotional challenges can try as well to see if they can make progress with their own mental health.
I'm currently living in Houston, working as a SWE, and can attest to the pros of living here. Regarding your concerns, the city is quite demographically diverse from people of all walks of life. Summers do get hot and humid, but nothing unbearable. The winters are more than tolerable (its currently 68 degrees outside) as well.
Market data services such as Reuters/Morning Star provide incredibly clean data at great convenience for anything you can imagine, even including astronomical data.
Its kind of like the Black-Scholes model. If it really was that simple and straightforward, everybody would be using it to make a ton of money.
Founded by Jim Simons, the "Father" of quantitative research. The firm is famous for their significant year-over-year returns and notorious for only hiring PhDs from mathematics/physics/computer science.
There is an interesting book on how Jim Simons created the company and built his team of academics from the ground up, "The Man Who Solved the Market"