👋 Hi, I'm Daniel! I'm a machine learning engineer with an emphasis on
the intersection of research and product.
I'm currently at xAI, working to advance the best AI systems in the world.
I've spent time in both the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing domains,
most recently as the Head of AI Engineering at Harvey AI. Before that, I did Computer Vision Research
at Tesla on the Autopilot team, helping build and ship Full Self Driving.
You can see more of my work on LinkedIn.
This website exists for three main reasons:
1️⃣ Firstly, as a representation of my career and resume.
If you came hoping to understand who I am and what I've worked on, welcome!
You can find my resume here.
2️⃣ Secondly, as a public repository of my writing. I am a strong believer in
writing to solidify my thinking and building clarity by formulate ideas onto paper.
Doing this in public is an extra forcing function to be rigorous in my thinking,
so I try to do it when time permits.
I write primarily about interesting product development and engineering challenges.
The psychology of building a great product, the organizational challenges of scaling startups,
the latest research in ML, and more. I tend to write in a build-in-public style,
so some of my posts are more polished than others. I try to share my learnings as I go,
writing what I wish I knew years ago.
3️⃣ Thirdly, as a sandbox to tinker with things I'm interested in.
As the cost of software drops to zero, the pipeline of idea → software prototype →
ship to the internet is increasingly low friction. If you hold the rough mental
model of a web browser as "a way to let other people easily run the code I write",
this makes tinkering lots of fun! More-or-less anything that doesn't require authentication
or heavy compute processing can be written as a client-only application, aka a static site.
I'm not a web developer by trade, but I enjoy experimenting.
(I've been quite interested in local-first LLM inference lately for example, and
have been playing around with WebGPU to see how well you can run small models in the
browser). These sorts of small utilities aren't usually deeply novel or groundbreaking,
but are written with some interesting artistic perspective in mind,
or specific use case that I personally care about.
Welcome to my site! Writings, projects, and contact info below.