21 Years

I rarely write blogs, but this is a special occasion, my first birthday in the 🇺🇸. For those who don’t know me, I’m an AI researcher and cofounder of Lucid.ai, where I’m working on diffusion models for world simulation.

My journey began with an internship at a computer vision research lab in my city. Shortly afterward, I was recruited by a startup to help build their encryption system. When the original CTO left, the CEO offered me the position. Those two years were filled with painful setbacks and pivots, but we eventually transformed the company into a major enterprise leader.

After some soul-searching, I decided to start my own company. It’s a long story, but ultimately it didn’t work out. During that time, I was also contracting, which reintroduced me to the world of machine learning. I built an app for tracking weights and biases that immediately took off, attracting thousands of researchers.

The app’s popularity inspired me to start ML Chat to get to deepen my understanding of machine learning, ml chat is an invite only high snr group chat where people can discuss projects and complex ideas with close knit group of people, it grew quite unexpectedly and had at its peak 100 of the coolest researchers, they helped me grow my skills and discover many of the subsets of ML, I think it was referred to by some as the most productive thing on X.com

Friendships

I didn’t have close friends until I was 20. Despite being considered outgoing, I never found anyone who understood me back home, most people there are surprisingly dull and don’t want to think beyond politics and social gossip, I liked coding, reading wikipedias and talking about the brain, history…

Friendships fascinate me as social structures. I’m surprised by how far I’ll go to ensure my friends are happier than their baseline. What amazes me most is that many of my closest friendships formed entirely through Discord and Twitter chats, thousands of miles apart.

I remember telling my other friend I wish i met you 3 years ago instead of 4 months ago, It sounds silly at the time, but for me it signified how much of my personality (in a good way) was molded by them.

[Pictures below]

“Neurodivergence” or “wrong spawn point”

One of my most painful memories occurred at 14, when I was expelled from school for excessive absences. My parents enrolled me in a religious school, triggering a long depressive episode that ultimately led to me leaving formal education.

The condition for quitting school was taking medication. I endured antidepressants with serious side effects, though my diagnosis was later revised to ADHD and, most recently, ASD. Its not surprising as I suspected some correlations with my other friends who are also on the ASD spectrum. The saying “alike people seems to attract alike” certainly holds true.

I’ve always felt like a stranger in my birthplace, as if I’d been accidentally spawned there. I rarely spoke my native language; English always felt more natural. Whether this sense of alienation stemmed from neurodivergence or something else, I’ll never know for certain.

Whats next?

“Watching models learn, I felt at home.”

I’ll continue working on generative models, exploring how I can contribute to this peculiar and ever-evolving world.

Feel free to say hi on Twitter @probflow (originally @rami_mmo) or email me at rami@lucid.ai.