general update
realized i haven’t done this in a while
recently some friends have been asking what i do at my job and i gave some pretty awful explanations, so here i’m going to try to describe what my work actually feels like:
first of all we rebranded from generally intelligent to imbue around a month ago
my primary work is helping scale up our large language model training. i spent a while running experiments to get a better understanding of different datasets and benchmarks. there’s also a bunch of lower-level work to figure out how to get these models to load and train efficiently (in theory this is a solved problem because there are lots of well-documented open-source packages. in practice it’s not so simple because we’re working with bigger models than eg. pytorch’s intended / primary use case)
my secondary work is helping with ai policy. we have a former lawyer who thinks about policy full-time and does things like networking and talking to people who work in dc; i think policy is important so i help with miscellaneous tasks like brainstorming and data analysis. in my free time i’ve also been reading a bunch of ai x econ/labor papers; i don’t have a concrete plan of what to do with them yet but i believe this is an important subject that very few tech people think about and i’ll do something with it soon
culture is interesting. every friday we have a meeting where we discuss how to improve company processes, and another meeting where we talk about feelings (about work, about coworkers, about non-work stuff that has been affecting work, etc). i was skeptical of these meetings at first but have found them extremely valuable for learning more about my coworkers, resolving various workplace issues, etc. (i should clarify that these meetings are feasible because there are ~15 people at the office). i also really like how open-ended 1:1s here are, eg. in my most recent 1:1 with my boss we mostly talked about relationships and making better facial expressions
other stuff:
i’m currently living in a 40-person house. that’s not as chaotic as it sounds because i have my own room and people are generally pretty respectful of each others’ space. i do feel out of place though, in large part because the house is overwhelmingly white (~90% last time i checked), so i might move out soon. i think this is the first time i have been in such an environment (my home in texas was ~50% hispanic + asian + black) and it really threw me off-guard
did the crosstown trail with my friends jacky and anson. it was really pretty! it was also much harder than i expected - i thought walking ~16 miles would be pretty chill because i ran a half-marathon in high school and felt fine afterwards (and i am definitely in better shape than i was in high school), but this time i was pretty exhausted by mile ~14. i think the most likely culprit is large elevation changes. another issue was that i dehydrated myself to avoid using the bathroom
i never watched most of the harry potter movies as a kid and wanted to reread the books, but i also didn’t want to spend too much time revisiting harry potter, so over the past week i’ve been watching the movies and reading the books at the same time (as in, i start each movie and then read the corresponding book at the same pace as the movie). it’s gone surprisingly well! there were a few times where a movie skipped a bunch of content and i had to pause it to catch up on the book, but in general the film adaptations are faithful enough that everything was manageable