About Me

I’m Darin.

I recently graduated, dropped out of my Masters, and just moved to San Francisco with a year of runway.

Personal Background

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.

What I Care About

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. 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.

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!

My Interests

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.

Get in Touch

Feel free to reach out to me through any of the social links below. I’m always open to interesting conversations and collaborations!

I don’t take myself too seriously. I hope you don’t either.