Adept AI and I
Exciting announcement: After graduating from UC Berkeley with a major in Computer Science and Economics, I’m headed to San Francisco to join Adept AI Labs as a Member of their Technical Staff! Adept is building an AI automation tool that creates a natural language interface for your computer — just say what you want, Adept will do it for you. Your virtual personal assistant. You can learn more about them here. I’m so excited to work alongside this small but brilliant team, to learn and grow, and to create the future of automation.
Why Adept?#
Years ago, I watched a now very famous talk by designer Bret Victor called “Inventing on Principle”. Bret Victor works on new dynamic mediums of thought beyond the limitations of our computer interfaces. In the talk, he passionately expresses that the restriction of ideas due to the limitations of a medium is not merely a startup opportunity for him, but a source of deep moral anguish, fueled by his profound love for ideas. It is not strategic but emotionally important to him to solve this problem. It’s his personal crusade, the purpose he strives to fulfill in his life.
For me, I love productivity tools. But I do not mean another mundane todo list or calendar app. Self-driving cars are a productivity tool, giving people hours of their day back. Figma is a productivity tool, significantly reducing the barrier to design and making that process 10x faster. Text messages are a productivity tool, so you don’t have to walk all the way to the post-office. Electricity, airplanes, the modern banking system, packaged foods — some of the most fundamental creations of this century are productivity tools.
Human life is deeply, fundamentally short — all of us will probably live another billion seconds, and that’s it. Productivity tools, done right, fundamentally improve the quality of day-to-day human life.
What hurts me most is when people waste their time doing things that they don’t enjoy, or waste time struggling to bridge the gap between desire and execution. Adept’s mission to close the gap between intent and action, through automation, could change how we interact with computers. It could bring magic back to technology.
What’s Next?#
Lots of work! AI as a whole is in its infancy, and I’m excited to be in the thick of it. I’m primarly interested in moving AI from its current realm of ability to a realm of utility. This means working on inference speed, network optimizations, serving at scale, improved user interfaces, and more.
I’m really grateful to the Adept team, and really excited for what the future holds! I will continue writing here, and the Daily Ink will continue going out weekly starting June. I will also continue building projects on the side. My personal writer site is the best place to follow those. If you’re in San Francisco, drop me a line and I’ll brew you some ☕️.