TL;DR
Leveraging the geographical advantages of Silicon Valley, I attended AI Meetups and was given a tour of Uber headquarters. I decided to change labs and, with the help of many people, successfully arranged to work under a new professor. While keeping up with the latest trends in AI, I'm exploring research directions for my second year.
0. Stanford Athletes in Paris Olympics 2024
It seems that the Stanford athletes excelled at the Paris Olympics (most medals among U.S. universities). Top U.S. universities accept many students who excel in specific talents like athletics. I also feel that many students here are outstanding in abilities that can't be measured by paper tests, such as social skills.
1. Research
08/05 AI Meetup @GithubHQ
08/15 AI Meetup @AmazonSF
08/19 Office Tour @UberHQ
08/19 AI Meetup @GithubHQ
08/27 Stanford CENTAUR Annual Meeting 2024
08/28 Stanford AI Safety Annual Meeting 2024AI Meetup
I attended several AI Meetups at tech companies, learned about the latest trends in AI engineering, and enjoyed networking.
OpenAI officially announced support for Structured Outputs, and the importance of typing in programming is increasing even more. python+pydantic or ts+zod are becoming de facto standards. Jason Liu's talk, Pydantic is all you need (2023), is famous. This year, he gave a talk titled "Pydantic is still all you need" (should be uploaded to YouTube soon).
Many attractive AI SaaS are being released on GitHub, and among them, Teable is particularly noteworthy. It's a No-Code Postgres with a spreadsheet-like interface, and features like Natural Language Query and AI Agents are on the development roadmap. I want to keep an eye on it.
It's gratifying to see that AI Scientist from Sakana AI is also gaining attention here as a Japanese team.
Personally, I'm excited about Supabase's postgres.new and Vercel's v0.
Uber Office Tour
I was invited by my friend Christina, who is participating in Uber's summer internship from Stanford CS, to tour Uber's office. The buffet-style cafeteria offers a wide variety of food, and employees can eat as much as they like for free (including takeout for dinner). The office also has a gym and a meditation room. Free drinks and snacks are provided, making it appealing to come to the office.
Stanford CS Annual Meeting
I attended the annual meetings of CENTAUR and the AI Safety center.
The first day focused on Automated Reasoning, but many presentations were heavy on mathematical formulas, making it honestly difficult to keep up. The second day was about AI Safety, and since the technical topics centered on Bias and Alignment, I was able to gain not only research trends but also practical application ideas like the Large Language Monkey.
Switching Labs
Since Professor Chris, who currently supports me, is scheduled to take a leave from Stanford, I asked Professor Carlos to support me in my second year. He specializes in Explainable AI (like LIME and SHAP) but is also famous for XGBoost. Recently, he's been focusing on LLMs like Stanford Alpaca.
In my first year, I pursued a wide range from low-level technologies like understanding and tuning LLM implementations to application development. In my second year, while focusing on practical application, I want to proceed thoughtfully to avoid burning out or struggling to maintain motivation by becoming too short-term oriented.
In any case, there's much to learn from life in Silicon Valley, so I want to cherish this opportunity.
2. Life
08/00 ⚾️ Watch Baseball @Oracle Park
08/04 🥾 Hike @Stanford Dish
08/09 🍣 Dinner @Japanese Restaurant
08/14 🎲 Board Game @Stanford Library
08/22 🥾 Hike @Castle Rock State Park
08/29 🎲 Board Game @Stanford LibrarySocial Life @Stanford
I enjoyed hiking and board games with friends. It's wonderful to have opportunities to practice English conversation while refreshing myself.
