Reflecting on for.ai...

Key Takeaways

foreign [Music] [Music] computer science slack group about like I have this idea I want to do a project on some machine translation work and people who are interested are welcome to join and I remember there's like maybe 12 15 of us came up in the first meeting and he just gave us like a small task and he put us through this like Hunger Games trial where we all had to complete this like tensorflow tutorial at the time I never even wrote a line of like tensorflow in my life so um I just remember I actually stayed up like all night doing the challenge not because I was worried about submitting it on time but it's more just like out of pure curiosity and interest and I found myself like yeah being pretty surprised that I would be this interested in something I barely knew about um so I think that was like very inspiring after he filtered that out we met up in this actual room in this was me sneaking a picture of that meeting I feel like I would want to remember this one day yeah that lack of the first research research project I've ever done and there was an article written by the university about this project um there's a there's a picture of us let me show you yeah so when we our first paper we like I I almost didn't even believe it but like our first paper it was accepted into iclr and Not only was it accepted as a as a poster it wasn't like it was like the top 20 best papers at the conference or something it was like oh my God I couldn't believe it like we were just a bunch of kids like a bunch of undergrads you know doing this on the side like it didn't feel like we belonged you know like when I was at LCL I was like had like such an events imposter syndrome you know I was in this poster Hall with all these like crazy PhD people I'm supposed to like answer questions about this paper like are you kidding me like yeah I think I think after that conference it was like uh it's like damn like this is like a real field you know like not like a we can actually do this and then after that project we decide to you know continue this work and then maybe you can invite more people especially people who are in the undergrad or don't have much um research experience to work together and that's when we created for AI I think earliest memories was I think it was me Sid Aiden and Ivan um we just sit in this little wework room and work on like whatever research project that we had at the time at the time tpus were also relatively new so I remember all the days we spent debugging those those horrible things but yeah I just really enjoyed those those like days when I was an undergrad and I was just trying to learn how to do research it was my intro into research I never had any research experience in the past I never thought about research to begin with so yeah everything was very new for me it was very fresh and I quite enjoyed it I mean so much so that switched my you know entire career path and now I'm doing my PhD and so on so hopefully I don't require any future yeah so far so good and it got me started with ML research as well which is something I continue to do every day um and yeah obviously I ended up making some of the greatest friends of my life through poor AI I don't think I've seen anything similar to what we created back then yeah I think it's just very welcoming I guess less intimidating to get into the field whenever you know is in the same boat as you it just felt like you belonged somewhere and people care about your progress and your learning um yeah I don't know that's that's just something I really liked I think it was just like irrational dedication to something because like like I think we were all weirdly motivated to work on this project but I like it's not like we were getting paid like most people already have full-time jobs and then they're like doing this on top of it um and like pretty dedicated as well so I think that that just like was really motivating for me to to do the same and to stay committed to something and mostly to stay committed to learning and developing more skills because you could never have enough as a researcher I think the best advice I've ever given to anyone is just like invest in your like workbench you know like make sure you can you can actually make mistakes really easily and then like figure out what what went wrong and then like repeat the experiment again and again again um so I'd say like invest a lot in your tooling because ultimately that that decides how fast you're learning and how fast you're getting better at this field yeah I would say just like explore a lot I think it's very easy to optimize for one thing and and have some goal and be like if I'm gonna ignore everything and only you know work on this but I think having breaths of experience and like not being afraid to fail and to struggle I think it's like really important especially as a researcher because I think most things don't work on your first try or at all sometimes I think for many of us in the original crew we got to where we are at the research industry mostly because of either project or connection we made in this group so one of my advice for the existing member of newcomers for this in this group in particular is to utilize the connection we have within this group I think people in general are pretty low ego um I think that Stouts a lot because like it's it's kind of a privilege I think to have opportunities um especially if you came from like a really good school or like had a lot of resources at your disposal I think many of four ai's members might not have come from like you know American schools mostly International and I think having a lot of people from different backgrounds like all very curious about one thing together is what kind of drove the community I definitely want to scale this access the opportunity that I had the fortune of being able to take advantage of right like you know I I dropped out of school I've never been like academically inclined really like my parents don't work in Academia so there was like really no way for me to break in right and so uh I felt like I feel like that is such an important opportunity to have for people who just want to work really hard and you know make something of themselves in this field um so I I'm hoping to provide like sort of pay it forward in a sense yeah I'm like really grateful that I happened to come across for you guys [Music]