A letter to my future employer

Context

I recently went to a tech innovation meetup and talked to people from a lot of different backgrounds. When they asked what I was doing, I said, "I'm doing a master's in AI." A lot of them were not happy about that. Rightfully so. Some had lost their jobs because of AI. Others were having a hard time figuring out what to do next. PhDs, startups, all sorts of things.

A guy doing his master's in climate change told me his family's farms were producing less every year. He wanted to understand it well enough to help reverse that. A sociology PhD student said his university was dropping professors and moving the money into AI, which was making it hard to continue his research. A woman was starting a podcast to give a voice to creative people who had lost their jobs to AI.

After those conversations, saying I work in AI meant I had to answer why I am studying it, and what I think it is for. Each conversation made the answer a little better, until I felt ready to write it as a letter.

Cover

I think AI is one of the most important technologies humans have ever invented. It is going to change our lives and our society in ways we have not even considered yet. I am super optimistic about that. But that does not mean everything is perfect right now.

A lot of what is happening right now is still a mess: data centers in cities that do not want them, the water AI uses, people getting more dumb and less aware, jobs disappearing. Alongside that, it is solving mathematical problems we never could, speeding up research in medicine and defense, and turning ideas into real things quickly enough that small businesses are growing from it. Putting that power in ordinary people's hands is the utopian dream I live for.

I want to help bring AI into everyday life. Everyone can open an AI tool now, but that is still the surface. Real adoption starts when AI shows up physically, through art, politics, culture, robotics, or something else entirely. I want to influence that, from my own perspective.

Why me

I should be doing this. I have always been a problem solver with an optimistic mindset, and I adapt to new technology fast enough that, in AI, it is a superpower. The models change constantly, and I am already on the new one. What I do with it is connect it to work I already know: projects I have built, places I have worked, people I have collaborated with. All this shows up in my otherwise short career.

Back in college I started with a cat versus dog classifier, then scraped an anime website to build a recommendation system. After that I worked on UNet models, self-driving in simulation, and deepfake detection that can run on something as cheap as a Raspberry Pi. Then I started interning at Adobe, where I worked on how AI can sit inside a product used by millions without getting in the way of people's creative expression.

Through those seemingly different projects, a theme started showing up: using AI to make things better. Sometimes I was fine-tuning small language models to help me become a better runner, or othertimes to act like my girlfriend for the stupidity of it all. At Adobe, as a design engineer, I was spending half of my time making components and wiring up the design system and the other half on maximizing AI in our workflows and patterns so we could do more the right way.

Then I'd come back home and spend another countless hours adding a vision encoder to a text-only LLM so it could compress context or looking at redundancies between layers in a vision-language model, trying to make them small enough to run without a huge GPU. This and my side projects were all about figuring out how to bring AI closer to where we live on a daily basis.

I have explored such an extensive range of applications of AI, that through all of them, I have built a deep intuition of this technology which goes far beyond any college degree or job experience.

So, I want to put that intuition to use and do something meaningful with it.

The work I want

As I said, I would be a good fit for work that brings AI into the physical world through any of these mediums, whether it is industrial robots, a new way to create art, or something else entirely.

I want the systems to be smarter, so more of the work gets done and nobody is stuck handholding them through it. I want them more efficient, so we waste less and go easier on the environment. I want them unbiased, because equality is what we stand for, and a system this widely used should not work against that. I want them reliable and trustworthy, so they do not lie or hallucinate, including in medicine and law, where a wrong answer is not a small mistake. And I want them a little playful, so we do not get bored of a technology we are about to live with every day.

If this is something you stand for, let's chat: tomartarun2001@gmail.com