Pinned Tweet
This is an account for my everyday life and potentially some fringe content about AI/tech.
Will tweet at a higher frequency compared to my main acct. So follow only if you want to know more about my personal life, rants, whatever..
Also thanks to @agikoala for the great idea.
He's not wrong though....
META’S HEAD OF AI SLAMS AI BENCHMARKS
"it’s some PhD student who made these benchmarks"
"you’re kind of outsourcing all of your product thinking to this viral benchmark"
"so clearly that’s wrong"
I think there is something to this. the whole industry developed so rapidly that there was hardly any time to establish proper benchmarking. companies used what was available, competitors then had to catch up on the same benchmarks, and some of them eventually became industry standards
apparently there is quite a lot of randomness and chance in how we are measuring AI progress today
In many sports, many guys can just muscle their way through with atheletism. Especially if you're an alpha type guy, you tend to do okayish at sports at a minimum.
Badminton is a completely different thing. Often times guy beginners (especially those with ego) will embarass themself on the court. It's a game all about skill. You can't muscle your way through. Try to and you just hit the net, out or just miss the shot completely. Utterly embarrassing.
Many male beginners always assume they can play well in any sports and some often bring their ego to the court, sometimes also wanting to show off to girls.
The end result is more often than not embarrassing and honestly cringey.
yi retweeted
Welcome to Gemini 4✨ Super excited for what we’ve built! Hope everyone enjoys working with it as much as we do every day!
yi retweeted
Gemini 4 is here! 🚀 And it outperforms astra/fable on many things 😇🤓
yi retweeted
Congrats @vqctran. So excited for you and see what you achieve next.
We had a lot of fun working together over the years and we co-invented so much together. I will miss you. 🫡
Always remember you joking about quitting AI to do some bio stuff. I'm glad you're finally pursuing your passion.
All the best!
After 10 incredible years at Google, I've left @GoogleDeepMind to join @thematthewosman and @FabioZB_I at Polyphron as a co-founder and explore the next frontier in my research passions.
Together, we're training frontier models that autonomously explore, understand, and physically reproduce human tissue biology. It's our grand vision to grow tissues realistic enough to match human response to all drugs, and realistic enough to recover organ function when transplanted into living organisms.
Other than the bitter lesson, I think another lesson remains true in the history of ML: the more directly you can optimize your end goal, the better your outcome will be. IMO this is one lesson largely missed in the drug discovery and computational biology space today, and one that Matt and Fabio understood very clearly (and why I joined them on this journey!).
At the heart of our company is one giant RL problem: propose a recipe to grow tissue, sample life itself, reward directly against the functionality of the tissue. If this sounds exciting to you as either an AI or Life scientist, feel free to reach out! We're building the coolest lab in NYC :)
I'll never forget all of the {pretraining, RL, self-improvement} projects I worked on with my brilliant friends at GDM over the years, but I'm even more excited to share the things we discover next!
(p.s. this isn’t the first time i RL’d something based off of similarity, iykyk)
My fun Singaporean academic background 👇
- was a horrible student in secondary sch, almost retained at sec 2. Form teacher said I was surely going to ITE. Lol
- failed all my subjects and barely passed 3 subjects to promote to sec 3.
- I got 15 points for Olevels after a last burst of fire about several weeks before. Prelim was some ungodly 50 points or something. My form teacher again told my parents I was going to ITE.
- I went to PJC. Many people today think I went to raffles. 😂
- I started getting hooked on to piano in JC and started grinding hard. I also started playing badminton more seriously then. So I skipped all my lectures and didn't do any homework. I also probably didn't do my practical alevels properly which gave me a huge bell curve nerf later.
- Hated studying. I blame the school system starting at 7am. I was always sleeping in class. 💤💤 They should start school at 11am or something c'mon.
- I failed all my alevel subjects in prelim. Again almost retained in j1 but I forgot why I got to j2 safely (bell curve god?)
- I ended up with BCC for alevels. I got D for my h1 subject lol why did I take geography. Fun stuff. I somehow applied and got to EEE in NTU.
- but that sounds so scary so during my 2 year national service I reapplied and got into computer engineering. Looks less intense?
- I enrolled in uni. Idk why I didn't like programming then. But I switched to CS in my first semester.
- I played a lot in my first 2 years of uni. I was not as much as a feeder in my pre uni days but I started my first sem as a second lower honours. Somewhere I became 2nd upper but I forgot.
- at some point near my third year of uni I started "awakening" more and tried this study stuff. I still hated studying but I was getting good gpa for my last 3 semesters.
- somehow enrolled into PhD without knowing why....
The rest is history...
Fast forward to today, somehow became the best ai researcher in Singapore (ok to be humble I will say one of the best lol but I'm sure the other contenders will be happy to concede this title to me. Not that it matters).
Some people always cope by saying people who don't study well in school only become successful by non academic means (like becoming a business man etc). That's cope. I've done it in the most academic way possible despite being destroyed during my schooling years. Don't judge people by their results in school lol!
I also want to add that the irony is that I would have been way worse off if I actually did well for alevels. And that is the real kicker. The system is weird that all your good grades just gives you more choice at uni but not necessarily a better one. If the wisdom of crowd is wrong then too bad. Obviously if I was born in another era where CS was AAA then I would have been rekt.
I was a bit lucky but the point here is that getting good grades just guarantees maybe a slightly better lower bound of doing better than the median. I also observe that it's not necessarily true that if you were a better student you have a better working adult life/financial payoff etc. anecdotally and observing from my friends etc...
I also spent a huge chunk of my schooling days being looked down on, but somehow that never got to me. Not a single bit. I knew deep down I was smartish and the ability to score well in exams is not interesting to me.
I was so horrible at sec school that somehow one of my sec sch classmate who ended up on the same uni course as me would come up to me and ask me how many courses I failed this time. (Not a joke, but the joke is maybe not realizing how we ended up in the same place after some 8 years of me goofing off). That person was dilligent for many years. Haha.
Early game in sg is overrated. Mostly a deep dive into a local minima (a decent one but far from global).
I frequently tell others the reason why I'm here today is because I did horribly for a levels and CS was a alevels dumping ground back then. If I had a strong early game maybe I could have accidentally gone into finance or law. 😳
Common wisdom in sg is also generally local minima diving and more often than not, just bad advice. Be brave to be who you are and enjoy what you do.
- Be born in Singapore middle class family
- Be smart boy, get into GEP program in P4, score 265 in PSLE and get into RI
- Be subject of adulation and pride in annual CNY dinners
- All elders declare he will have bright future and is family's chance to move into upper middle class next time
- Scores well enough in A levels to land local uni scholarship, passes over Oxbridge because rejected for PSC scholarship
- Chooses to go on the finance path as medicine and law are not his thing
- Be dean lister in uni, slight weird feeling when other poly kias in his course also get on dean's list
- Get Tier 2 BB front office internship, does well and gets converted
- Family cheers and screams with joy. Can't get into GS or JPM but starting salary still twice of national median.
- Feels destined for ascension to upper middle class. Can't wait to do well and escape into buy-side after 2-3 years.
- First day at work, chao poly kia from your uni is your colleague in the graduate program
- All joy dissipates, existential crisis, what is the meaning of my teenage years?
Lol inspired by this let's see how my early game went....
My fun Singaporean academic background 👇
- was a horrible student in secondary sch, almost retained at sec 2. Form teacher said I was surely going to ITE. Lol
- failed all my subjects and barely passed 3 subjects to promote to sec 3.
- I got 15 points for Olevels after a last burst of fire about several weeks before. Prelim was some ungodly 50 points or something. My form teacher again told my parents I was going to ITE.
- I went to PJC. Many people today think I went to raffles. 😂
- I started getting hooked on to piano in JC and started grinding hard. I also started playing badminton more seriously then. So I skipped all my lectures and didn't do any homework. I also probably didn't do my practical alevels properly which gave me a huge bell curve nerf later.
- Hated studying. I blame the school system starting at 7am. I was always sleeping in class. 💤💤 They should start school at 11am or something c'mon.
- I failed all my alevel subjects in prelim. Again almost retained in j1 but I forgot why I got to j2 safely (bell curve god?)
- I ended up with BCC for alevels. I got D for my h1 subject lol why did I take geography. Fun stuff. I somehow applied and got to EEE in NTU.
- but that sounds so scary so during my 2 year national service I reapplied and got into computer engineering. Looks less intense?
- I enrolled in uni. Idk why I didn't like programming then. But I switched to CS in my first semester.
- I played a lot in my first 2 years of uni. I was not as much as a feeder in my pre uni days but I started my first sem as a second lower honours. Somewhere I became 2nd upper but I forgot.
- at some point near my third year of uni I started "awakening" more and tried this study stuff. I still hated studying but I was getting good gpa for my last 3 semesters.
- somehow enrolled into PhD without knowing why....
The rest is history...
Fast forward to today, somehow became the best ai researcher in Singapore (ok to be humble I will say one of the best lol but I'm sure the other contenders will be happy to concede this title to me. Not that it matters).
Some people always cope by saying people who don't study well in school only become successful by non academic means (like becoming a business man etc). That's cope. I've done it in the most academic way possible despite being destroyed during my schooling years. Don't judge people by their results in school lol!
I like people knowing looped transformers originally came from @m__dehghani
i used to feel a little insecure about the singaporean accent. but i realised if you're cool, the accent becomes cool too.
when i arrived in the US, my Singlish accent threw so many Americans off
they could barely understand me, some even thought English was our second language
feeling embarrassed, i started compiling the key differences between Singlish and American English pronunciation
the main difference i noticed is we Singaporeans actually pronounce a lot of everyday words very differently
for “th”, Singaporeans usually replace it with a harder “t” or “d”
so “three stops” becomes “tree stops”
“this one” becomes “dis one”
which sounds completely normal until you say it to an American
we also tend to shorten our vowels a lot
words we use all the time like “food court”, “carpark” or “Grab” come out super clipped, while Americans stretch their vowels much more
another big one is where we put the stress in a word
even words like “McDonald’s”, “opportunity” or “delivery” can somehow sound completely different just because we stress a different syllable
and probably the biggest difference is how we end words
Singaporeans tend to barely pronounce the final consonant
so “take Grab”, “wait”, “card” or “last stop” can end super abruptly
to us it sounds perfectly clear
to Americans it sometimes sounds like we deleted half the word 💀
never really noticed any of this until Americans kept asking me to repeat myself