M.Eng. - Electrical & Computer Engineering 👨🏻🎓 Interests: • Computer Science & Engg. 👨🏻💻 • Quantum & Particle Physics ⚛️ S.T.E.M.-focused 🌱📚🤔💡
Canada
Joined May 2021
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Akul retweeted
BREAKING: World's largest crypto exchange Binance hacked with over $5.6 billion stolen:
• $1.45 billion $BTC
• $875 million $ETH
• $234 million $TRX
• $50 million $XAUT
• $1.57 billion $USDT
• $823 million $USDC
• $75 million $WBETH
• $88.5 million $RLUSD
+ $447.5 million additional cryptocurrencies
This is the largest hack in crypto history.
Akul retweeted
always tried to ensure that at least 50% of any hiring I've done is to find the ~2 hackers that are there in every college batch in every non-brand-name college in India, irrespective of grades, branch or heck even graduation. obviously also am biased because I was one such. one of the best devs we hired had iirc 2 years worth of 'back papers'.
separately, among my most admired seniors, almost 0 had a formal CS background. civil engineering, biochem, fine arts, seen it all.
this isn't to say that a pedigree doesn't matter. it does.
but there are many kinds of pedigree. grades and a brand-name college are only 2 of them. in our game, there is also proof-of-work, and that pedigree, my friends, cannot be faked.
Akul retweeted
I keep speaking to folks who are anxiously hypothesizing about the future of AI so much they're struggling to do consistent meaningful work in the meantime. The future is uncertain but falling off before we get there is not the way. It's ok to ignore the rhetoric for a while.
Akul retweeted
Funding rounds aren't milestones. It shouldn't be your goal to raise a series A. It should be your goal not to need to.
Akul retweeted
q: why can't we just remove positional embeddings from transformers?
bad answer: "because transformers need to know word order"
good answer: "self-attention without positional
information is permutation equivariant. rearranging
the input tokens rearranges the outputs, but doesn't
tell the model which token came first"
understand the math, knowing the architecture is not enough :)
Akul retweeted
putting our money where our mouth is on hard tech
We're doubling down on hardware and are looking for someone to manage our hardware shop ycombinator.com/companies/y-…
Akul retweeted
We're doubling down on hardware and are looking for someone to manage our hardware shop ycombinator.com/companies/y-…
Akul retweeted
AI may well be able to write massive software projects “from scratch”, but that almost certainly isn’t the fastest / highest performance / highest security / most token efficient way to do things. Good building blocks matter.
In addition to RL’ing the agents on final task loss, we should try to get them to regularize the building blocks as well. What would the standard library look like that makes the agents most effective?
It is likely at the limit that it turns out to be some alien organization of code, but given the existing human-bias in training, I bet that in the near term it would be lovely code that old programmers would appreciate.
I suspect the same could be said for mathematics, but that is out of my lane.
Akul retweeted
As someone who works in Google and interacts with Googlers who do real work, I am confident that the people who post these kinds of videos are basically doing nothing of consequence.
Akul retweeted
Bloomberg's @markgurman says the iPhone Duo screen-cracking issues are real and that the way Apple has handled them has been a dumpster fire:
Akul retweeted
Canada’s sovereignty depends on our ability to build, adopt, and govern AI on our own terms.
That’s why Canada is taking an equity stake in Cohere — one of the world’s leading builders of secure AI.
Sovereign AI. Built here at home.
Read more: pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releas…
ALT Prime Minister Carney makes an announcement in Montréal, Québec.
Akul retweeted
UPDATE: We are able to expand eligibility for No Limit to university students in the U.S. and Canada.
(Plus recent grads from ’25 or ’26.)
Apply to the closest regional event. Registration now open.
Announcing No Limit: a bot building tournament hosted by @Sequoia, @citsecurities and @OpenAI.
Teams of 1 or 2 get 60 minutes to build a pokerbot from scratch.
Agents play thousands of games across six scored rounds.
Open to university students and recent grads (‘25 or ‘26).
Regionals in Boston, Pittsburgh and the Bay Area in early November. Top five teams from each fly to the Finals. $100K grand prize.
Akul retweeted
The Boring Company is pleased to announce our Series D funding round of $3 billion, led by the United Arab Emirates. The financing now values The Boring Company at $23 billion.
Other key investors in the round include Human Capital, Vy Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, A16Z, Temasek, Shamal Holding, and Baron Capital, in addition to other valued existing and new investors.
Full details here:
boringcompany.com/series-d
Akul retweeted
Instead of Space Age carbon fiber or aluminum-lithium, SpaceX is building its Starship rocket out of stainless steel.
Stainless steel is easy to weld, far cheaper, and under the right conditions, it has a similar strength-to-weight ratio as carbon fiber.
@elonmusk explains: