121 Interviews
<5 months
Applied to ~200 companies
Platforms : Well Found, Jobs24x, Ycom, Cold Email, Instahyre
Most Rejection Reason: HLD round
Finally 3 Offers 1 MNC 2 Startups
Just one tip: Don’t get yourself enough time to think about last rejection
South Korea's "Miracle on the Han river" (rapid industrialization, mass literacy & urbanization) occurred before democratization. Similarly Japan underwent Meiji era modernization & achieved high literacy before its post WW2 democratization. While in India, the masses were given the power to vote before they were even civilized, it was like giving guns to chimps. Now these same masses elect their corrupt & thuggish caste overlords in every election & the vicious cycle continues
i'm in love with this quote:
"if you're persistent, you'll get it. if you're consistent, you'll keep it. and if you're grateful, you'll attract more of it."
New blackboard lecture w @ericjang11
He walks through how to build AlphaGo from scratch, but with modern AI tools.
Sometimes you understand the future better by stepping backward. AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play. You have to go back to 2017 to get insight into how the more general AIs of the future might learn.
Once he explained how AlphaGo works, it gave us the context to have a discussion about how RL works in LLMs and how it could work better – naive policy gradient RL has to figure out which of the 100k+ tokens in your trajectory actually got you the right answer, while AlphaGo’s MCTS suggests a strictly better action every single move, giving you a training target that sidesteps the credit assignment problem. The way humans learn is surely closer to the second.
Eric also kickstarted an Autoresearch loop on his project. And it was very interesting to discuss which parts of AI research LLMs can already automate pretty well (implementing and running experiments, optimizing hyperparameters) and which they still struggle with (choosing the right question to investigate next, escaping research dead ends). Informative to all the recent discussion about when we should expect an intelligence explosion, and what it would look like from the inside.
Timestamps:
0:00:00 – Basics of Go
0:08:06 – Monte Carlo Tree Search
0:31:53 – What the neural network does
1:00:22 – Self-play
1:25:27 – Alternative RL approaches
1:45:36 – Why doesn’t MCTS work for LLMs
2:00:58 – Off-policy training
2:11:51 – RL is even more information inefficient than you thought
2:22:05 – Automated AI researchers
Interfaze is a new model architecture that outperforms in tasks like OCR, Object detection, Translation and more
It beats models like Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 flash and GPT 5.4 mini on 9 benchmarks
BREAKING: Tamil Nadu CM Joseph Vijay has directed the immediate shutdown of 717 TASMAC liquor outlets located within 500 metres of temples, schools, and bus stands.
The closures — 276 near religious sites, 186 near educational institutions, and 255 near bus stations — must be completed in two weeks.
i genuinely think most people just wanna make noise nowadays, keeping your head down and working hard until you have something to share has got more signal. desperation for attention only makes your PSNR go down.