alvina 🐯

phd candidate at @uoft // political parasociality & bias // cat mom
creator @projecttabula

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

gotta try out the "let's connect" stuff as much as i hate it but i'd really like to see more of the following on my feed

- academics in cogsci/psych/politics/AI
- solo founders/indie hackers
- video gamers
- political hot takes
- anyone in toronto!!!!

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

@emlasd bulgarian split squats. my #1 opp but so good for you

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

academia rewards having a take, but i think the best researchers are comfortable saying “it depends” and then actually explaining what it depends on. nuance is always important!!!

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

asking a chatbot for a neutral answer assumes we agree on what neutral is, and we really don't

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

@zckgpt NO! MINE! CITE ME! (just kidding)

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

something i've been doing with grok/claude while making my app is asking for a list of simulated tester feedback, which has been really useful when i don't have a lot of people using it yet

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

@aniqatc nooo this is literally so sweet and THIS IS MAKING ME CRY PURPLE IS ONE OF MY FAV COLOURS 🥲🥲

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

@_kelindi_ did you make a mini-me, your close friend of many years

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

@Ionkosm at this point i’ve optimized so that it’s 80% waiting since grok handles most of it now 🫪

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

i think a lot of political dislike is aimed at an imagined version of the other side, not the people you'd actually meet

[Manoel @manoelribeiro]

What does ChatGPT tell folks about the midterm elections? It depends on who's asking!

We audited ChatGPT inside 160 real users' own accounts in the days before the midterms. With memory on, we find that answers shifted toward each user's own party!

https://t.co/upD2j70NZ5

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

me when i leave my laptop at home and make grok handle claude so i can go outside and do other things

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

@rohanbhanot thats true! although i think the aesthetic im trying to achieve is less modernized (like a lot of UIs are today), trying to give it more of a realistic and smooth feel which i dont think a lot of apps do (at least that ive found)

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

an issue im having with designing a vibe coded UI and not wanting it to look like AI slop is that there aren’t enough examples of what im looking for to build off of and i don’t think my knowledge has hit the point of being able to articulate what i want yet

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

@Ionkosm how much of my own prompt engineering can go into it though

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

the most honest sentence in a paper is usually in the limitations section, and it's the one nobody quotes

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

ive literally been so tired these last few days and had zero bandwidth for existing but there is so much work to do

[Oloye the Great @mustythegre8]

not to be a fucking nerd or anything but writing academic papers is actually super fun when you have a genuine interest in the topic

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

you can tell how polarized a topic is by how fast people ask which side you're on before they hear what you said

[alvina 🐯 @alvi_lai]

excited to see how this goes!! especially from someone with a track record of being ethical

[David Valerio Gilmore @davidvgilmore]

In 2015, I built an AI that detects early cancer.

It’s still running across hundreds of hospitals in the US today.

It was the most fulfilling work of my life, and I was building in AI years before everyone called it “AI”.

Building in AI then was a dream.

Now It feels like we’ve taken a turn for the worse.

It started when i was in undergrad.

I built my first company: AI models that made the political data transparent to voters.

At 21, I was offered six figures for it, but the buyers wanted to use it for reasons I couldn't ethically support.

So we turned down the offer and shut down the company instead.

In 2014, I moved into deep learning research on language models, for the Intelligence Community and Goldman Sachs.

Then HCA Healthcare came to us.

They put me in a competition against 10 people from IBM Watson. It was just me and the tools I’d built.

Our job was to build an AI model that can catch the cancer that slips through the cracks in hospitals.

It was the most intense 30 days of my life. Multiple all nighters.

My models won. That turned into a $5M deal, and later its own company, Azra AI.

Then the world caught on.

ChatGPT and Claude arrived, and AI costs exploded.

Building in AI in 2015 felt novel.

We were using it to find cancer tumours and save lives.

Now the biggest tech companies have turned AI into a money extraction machine.

That’s when I decided to make a change.

We raised $8.5M to build a better future for AI.

On Wednesday, we’re launching Rayline.

AI shouldn’t be locked inside a few labs’ models, prices and clouds. It should be open, transparent and decentralized.

More on Wednesday.