Vladyslav Koshelyev

Meditations on life, marketing, culture, and technology. Opinions are my own.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

@iamwenmun A really cool and unique blend of architectural styles

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

@noahkagan You could use Airplane mode while recording

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

The world is a canvas, and we are the brushstrokes.

[Rimsha Bhardwaj @heyrimsha]

A kid from Singapore who grew up training to be a concert pianist became one of the most important AI researchers alive, quit Google to start a frontier AI lab with 20 people and $60 million, built a model that competed with GPT-4 in a year, then walked away from the unicorn he created and went back to Google to lead the team that just won the International Math Olympiad with an AI.

His name is Yi Tay. Almost nobody outside the AI research world knows it.

Here is the story.

Yi grew up in Singapore. He earned a classical piano performance diploma from Trinity College London in 2012 and almost became a professional musician. He went into computer science instead, did his PhD at Nanyang Technological University, and joined Google Brain as a research scientist. There were almost no Singaporean researchers in frontier AI at the time. He used to say he was on an uncharted path.

At Google he became the co-lead of PaLM-2, the brain behind Google's entire AI stack. He invented UL2, a pretraining method now used across the industry. He invented Differentiable Search Indexes. His work shipped inside Google Assistant, YouTube, and Search.

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Yi made a decision that shocked the research community. He left Google.

In 2023 he co-founded Reka with researchers from DeepMind and Meta. The headquarters was in San Francisco, but the team was scattered across Asia, Europe, and the US. They had no big-tech backing. They had 20 people total. They had $60 million in funding.

For context, OpenAI had around 600 people working on GPT-4. Google Gemini had 950 co-authors on the technical report. Reka had fewer than 5 people on pretraining.

Yi lived nocturnally for 639 days. Five cups of coffee a day. Takeout twice. He gained 15 kilograms. He had a newborn baby. He worked across time zones his entire team was spread across. He built infrastructure from scratch in places Google had taken for granted.

In May 2024 Reka Core debuted at number 7 on the LMSYS leaderboard. The only GPT-4 class model on the planet that was not trained by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or Meta. A 20-person company with 5 people on pretraining had just shipped a frontier model. Alibaba Cloud, NVIDIA, and Oracle became partners. The company hit a $1.3 billion valuation.

Then in November 2024 Yi did something nobody expected.

He walked away.

He posted a quiet note on his blog titled "Returning to Google DeepMind." After 639 days of building one of the most respected frontier labs outside the big four, he went back to the company he had left. He wrote that he had learned more than he ever thought possible. He did not explain much else.

Google made an extraordinary bet on him. They let him build something nobody else in the industry has, a DeepMind lab in Singapore. Yi runs it with Quoc Le. The team focuses on reasoning, reinforcement learning, and post-training for Gemini. It started with a dozen researchers. It now has over 300.

Last summer, Yi's team led the effort that won the International Math Olympiad gold medal with Gemini Deep Think. The model solved IMO problems in a live competition, the kind that fewer than a hundred humans on Earth can solve under time pressure. His team also drove the work behind Gemini's ICPC 2025 gold medal.

Yi still lives in Singapore. He still plays piano when he has time. He calls himself a global citizen who does not identify with any local AI scene. He has been at Google for nearly 14 years if you count the Reka detour. He says the Singapore lab is just getting started.

A pianist from Singapore co-led the model that powered Google AI, left to build a frontier lab with 20 people and beat models trained by armies, walked back into Google, and is now running the team that just taught a machine to win Math Olympiad gold.

The most influential AI researcher you have never heard of is sitting in a Singapore office right now, training the next generation of models that think.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

We are seeing a shift in the professional world, with AI no longer a niche expertise for the technical elite, but an everyday utility. However, as new models and tools flood the market, the core competencies required to work with them remain, dare I say, deeply human. In fact, AI is similar to other technologies that have become part of everyday life. It amplifies people who possess the ability to see what doesn't yet exist and express it clearly.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

https://t.co/kQ6P4DyI7K

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

https://t.co/kQ6P4DyI7K

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

Water

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

After several weeks without any follow-up from @Shopify, I cancelled in disgust. Guess what - they still charged me prorated monthly fee for the time their support wasn't responding and the product didn't work properly. @Shopify @tobi your company is rotten.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

I'm going to cancel my Shopify subscription and put all the money I save into ads to promote this - people who consider you should be warned.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

I'm going to cancel my Shopify subscription and put all the money I save into ads to promote this - people who consider you should be warned.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

@Shopify @tobi stop treating customers like crap

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

@Shopify @tobi stop treating customers like crap

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

When I followed-up the first time after several days without response and asked for an ETA, Shopify's support thought ETA was a "good question". Really??? That was on the April 18. On the April 26 ETA is still a good question - because no one responded!

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

When I followed-up the first time after several days without response and asked for an ETA, Shopify's support thought ETA was a "good question". Really??? That was on the April 18. On the April 26 ETA is still a good question - because no one responded!

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

Shopify now wants to move this to "DM". No - I tried reaching out via customer channels for weeks. This is now a public warning to other customers. Enough is enough.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

@Shopify @tobi your treatment of customers is absolutely atrocious. After you've blocked payments to my shop without any reasons - I've reached to your customer "support" weeks ago. Every time I check, they say they'll check internally. No follow-up, no ETA. Shameful behavior.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

@ShopifySupport No, I don't want to move this to DM - I already tried reaching out to your support. I want to post this publicly

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

@Shopify @tobi your treatment of customers is absolutely atrocious. After you've blocked payments to my shop without any reasons - I've reached to your customer "support" weeks ago. Every time I check, they say they'll check internally. No follow-up, no ETA. Shameful behavior.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

Well said

[Parminder Singh @parrysingh]

This viral post misses the mark on a few fronts.

It assumes that beyond a certain number - 10 crore, 100 crore, 1000 crore - everything you do is driven by greed.
It also reduces happiness to just health and relationships, as if purpose vanishes once you have a certain amount of money.

I won’t pretend there’s a universal number that’s ‘enough’. For some it’s 10, for others 100, for a few it’s far beyond. That’s personal.

But here’s what I can say.

Even after Rs. 100 crore, the desire to contribute doesn’t disappear. You still want to build, solve, and matter.
That’s not greed. That’s a human instinct to be useful.

After a point, work shouldn’t come at the cost of your health or relationships. But that also doesn’t mean stepping away from work.
It means you finally earn the right to choose how much you work, what you work on, and why.

Some principles worth considering:

1. Wealth buys choice, not closure. - It frees you from compulsion, not from purpose.
2. The opposite of greed isn’t idleness. It’s meaningful work. It means doing less of what drains you, and more of what feels worth doing.
3. Finally, balance isn’t about working less. It’s about working right

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

= GOING ROUND is out on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms =

Spotify: https://t.co/xyAbes7tHy

Apple Music: https://t.co/Aaie8lj6IO

A brand new song was born today,
I throw the dice and start to play,
I burst inside and out again,
Evaporate and fall like rain.

I hold on tight as this road bends,
I clap the rhythm with my hands,
I breathe in deep, I spread the wings,
I touch the keys, I pull the strings.

Sometimes I feel like my head is going round
Then up and down are turning upside down
And all the sounds 'round me than start to glow
This fire melts this day and lets it flow.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

Cyberpunk age has officially arrived

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

Meanwhile in Poland.

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

https://t.co/mvJXq0rtZI

[Vladyslav Koshelyev @koshelyev]

@dhh @George_Kurtz Just curious if you are planning on trying F1 cars, at least as a test.