- Building 🪄 DreamLoom
- ex-Senior Software Engineer @ Instacart
- Previously SWE at Coinbase, SeatGeek, PagerDuty etc.
- CS at University of Waterloo
My passion is to accelerate human progress with the ultimate goal of creating a better world where everyone can thrive and express their creativity. Currently, I'm focused on building an innovative experience that I believe will unlock and democratize human creative potential.
I have been closely following the AI/LLM/Diffusion space since it's inception (RealmPlay, my first "company" was built on a fine-tuned, block-merged version of Llama1, productionized by building an API on top of exllama, a framework meant for fast inference using consumer GPUs. I used vast.ai, renting multiple 3090's to serve production traffic, using a Digital Ocean Droplet and nginx as a multi-region load balancer -- this was well before projects like vLLM and other serving frameworks existed. I scaled the context from 4K to 16K with SuperHOT the day kaiokendev had the breakthrough of discovering RoPE scaling, which is now commonly used to extend context).
Funfact: I actually started building RealmPlay before Llama1 and was about to call it quits since all the models prior to it (GPT-J, Pythia, GPT-NeoX-20B etc.) lacked coherency -- just about as I was about to call it quits, the OSS LLM lords at Meta saved the day with the Llama release!
Some other projects I've explored in the space include:
- SoulBazaar - an LLM fine-tune community and marketplace powered by LoRAX
- ThumbGen - a YouTube Thumbnail Design Copilot using tool-calling & diffusion models
- Misc hacking (blog writer agent, video understanding via frame-extraction etc.)
While my professional background is largely in the Data / Infrastructure / FullStack space, my personal experiences, along with my consistent interest (following /r/LocalLLama, /r/StableDiffusion and X religiously) have led to me building an extremely strong foundation in AI engineering -- with a deep understanding of multimodal models (ssm + transformers + diffusion), fine-tuning, syntethic data generation, vector databases / RAG, prompt engineering, agentic frameworks, structured output, generative UI and other subject matter.
I love staying up to date with the cutting edge developments in the space and would love to chat about related topics -- feel free to reach out for a chat at either nikshepsvn@gmail.com or nikshep@dreamloom.ai