What to Expect
A brief post about who I am, what this blog/publication is, and what you might get out of it
Why this, why now
I want to have a home for my thoughts. I am recently discovering how much writing helps to clarify thoughts.
I have accumulated many, many thoughts on AI engineering and building reliable systems. I have also really enjoyed the writing I have found on Substack, and I would like to contribute and share my own perspective—Substack provides an intuitive way to get feedback and thoughts on my ideas, and I really want more of that.
I often have conversations where I see people doing things that caused me a lot of pain as I tried to scale up my AI pipelines. I intend to share ways to avoid this pain that work with the constraints many people face as they try to scale these systems, up. AI Engineering is a beautiful, emerging field that is a very fun mix of engineering, science, and the humanities—there has never been any field like this. I want to explore and teach it as well as I can.
For starters, I have an ~6 post pipeline where I distill a lot of the intuition, strategy, and philosophy of how I think about AI engineering. This starts with basic strategy, goes into some psychology/UX, tackles abstractions and how to find them, and basically covers the whole cycle of creating an AI product/feature/xyz.
I’ve noticed that as I build these, I have to create more because I want to keep what I’m saying to two or three main ideas per piece.
The writing will start off a little rough and unrefined as I hone my craft, but almost all of it will be from me. LLMs are incredibly helpful for writing, but their voice is bog-standard, generic, and hard to trust. You will get my original thoughts.
Expectations
You should expect a post roughly every 10 to 14 days. I admire WaitButWhy; I want my posts to be in-depth but not longer than necessary to communicate their ideas.
If you would like to pledge, please do so, but for now, you won’t get anything different! I’m very new to this, it would be very sweet, and I would deeply appreciate your support. Feedback is really important to me—I’d like to know if you found anything here helpful, or if you bounced off things.
Personal Background
I’m Darin.
I recently graduated, dropped out of my Masters, and just moved to San Francisco with a year of runway.
The first time I learned about AI was when I was 13. I read an incredible WaitButWhy post on the exponential curve of AI improvement. This fascinated me, but I didn’t know what to do with it, but it stuck with me for a while. I took a class my freshman year of college called The Limits of Being Human, and for the final presentation, posited that the limits of being human were no longer being set by our biology or social dynamics, but by the tools we create.
That summer, I wanted to make a "universal recommendation system” and I was realizing I basically had no CS or AI knowledge. I wanted to get good at both, but I had always shied away from technical topics because they scared me. I then read So Good They Can’t Ignore You, a book that told me that Career Satisfaction is achieved by just picking something and getting good at it. I then learned of GPT-3 in a conversation between Sam Altman and Ezra Klein. This was the most incredible thing I had ever heard of—a machine that can actually fucking learn! Combining these two threads, I decided to spend the foreseeable future “getting good at AI” (and CS!) because I wanted to create with it, and because it was clearly the most important thing in the world to learn about.
I spent a year and a half teaching myself the mathematical foundations, changed campuses, and had the privilege of diving firsthand into creating AI programs and starting NLP research with Dr. Jinho Choi.
Then, I jumped headfirst into two years of synthetic data generation in the mental health space—a majority of which was spent working on intractable problems given model capabilities. I bootstrapped my data from scratch with no ground truth, and have experienced many, many hours of pain while working to get anything reliably useful from LLM pipelines.
Seeing all the ways these systems can fail inevitably teaches you how to build pressure-tested systems that work. Achieving this takes innovation on both the technical and human levels: I was the sole data labeler for the final project iteration, meaning nothing could succeed unless I maintained rigorous self-consistency. Due to extreme resource constraints, I had to invest heavily in improving the user experience of labeling, scaling my own intuition, and rapidly iterating based on small feedback loops.
This is a very unforgiving experience I would not recommend to anybody, but after running the LLM engineering gauntlet on nightmare difficulty, I finally got some success (88 F1/n=150) on reliably distinguishing the presence of mental health (DSM) criteria in reddit posts.
On a more personal note, I love creativity in all its forms. I’m exploring writing right now, but it is one of many mediums. I love to learn and to talk to people. I enjoy ceramics—it gives me something to do with my hands, and is grounding and visceral. I also enjoy biking, because it’s a much more personal way to explore the place I’m in (vs, eg. a car).
I moved to SF because it’s where the weirdos are. There’s nowhere else to be if you want to be surrounded by interesting people doing incredible things. I’ve spent three weeks here, and I love it.
I don’t know what to work on yet, I don’t know how I want to spend my time, but I want to apply my competencies in ways that feel important and fun. I really care about human-AI collaboration, and I want to see how we can work, play, create together in new ways. Most of all, I want to create meaningful tools and systems that help people navigate life’s complexity, because I know firsthand how challenging that can be!
Community
This will be a thoughtful, kind, helpful space. Objections should be surfaced and discussed. I really want the people who read this to share how things resonate with them, what they found helpful, and what their experience or intuition disagrees with.
I don’t take myself too seriously. I hope you don’t either.
