Returning to Google DeepMind

After a modest 1.5 years in the wilderness and exploring the startup world, I have decided to return to my research roots.

I’m returning to Google DeepMind to work on AI research. I’m excited to explore exciting research directions pertaining to LLMs and find new research game changers.

I’ll be returning to report to my previous manager (Quoc Le) as senior staff research scientist.

This is my first week back and I’m super excited.

Reflections on my Reka arc

I’m thankful for all the things I got to learn and experience from joining and co-founding Reka. 

Technically, I have learned a lot about infrastructure outside Google, learned to use Pytorch/GPUs and other external infrastructure. I, alongside others at the founding team of Reka, also built really good models in a cost-optimal fashion. I’ve also learned to deal with unreliable GPUs, vendors and compute sources (blog post here). 

From my experiences, I also gave technical, introspective and in person talks at WebConf LLM day keynote and Vietnam's GenAI summit. Also special shoutout to swyx for hosting me on the latentspace pod to talk about my adventures and TechInAsia for the fun fireside chat. 

Meanwhile, I’ve also experienced a lot of interesting events as a startup founder which I would never have gotten a chance had I stayed all this time at Google. It was a big eye opening experience. I learned a lot about startups, business and the process of building a company from the ground up. That said, I still identify more as a scientist / researcher than anything else and hence my decision to return back to my roots.

I’m proud of the achievements we’ve made, especially in the early days of Reka. In May, we debuted as a top-5 org on Lmsys with Reka Core. The actual model was #7 and we achieved our goal of outperforming the early versions of gpt-4. IMO that was darn impressive given how much less resources (money, compute and manpower) we had compared to other labs. We raised a lifetime funding of 100M+ in batches but that is still relatively small compared to other teams. Moreover, this was built with a technical team of less than 15 people.

On the personal side, this was an intense period for me, especially after finding out that my wife was expecting our first child right as I began the startup journey and exactly right after I left Google. In order to juggle so many things at once, my physical and mental health took a big toll and my body scaled itself up with 15 KGs of fat due to the intensity and unhealthy lifestyle. On the bright side, I am now aggressively working to nurse myself back to full health and might write about it another time about this healing arc of mine.

It was a wild but meaningful ride for me. I thank everyone for this wonderful journey. I truly enjoyed working with everyone and all the fun team offsites at interesting unorthodox places like Dubai, Kyoto and Bali. 

I’ve had a good run and I trust that the company is in good hands with so many talented and capable people that Reka has managed to hire!

It was a good sabbatical / learning experience. 

Now it’s time to go back to research at Google.

Snippets of the last 1.5 years of adventure.

Special Shoutouts

This may be a bit random but abandoning the comfortable zone and doing a startup was really scary for me personally. I’m thankful for all the Google friends who stayed in contact with me during this whole time. Even as I transitioned into a Xoogler and more into the startup life, I was blessed to have such a support network. Special shoutout to (in no order) Vinh, Derek, Denny, Steven, Siamak, Mostafa, Don, Divy and Quoc, along with fellow xoogler friends like Jason, Jerry, Hyung Won and Afroz who stayed in touch even after I left.

Interestingly, I’ve met up with so many of you during this time! I got to hang out with Derek, Vinh, Jason, Jerry, Quoc, Divy, Sanket, Swaroop and Neil at some point in Singapore. Also, very nice of Thang Luong for inviting me to Vietnam to speak as well!

I thank everyone for the warmth/support and the low-key nudges that I should come back :) Finally and most importantly, I thank Quoc for all his check-ins and friendship throughout these 1.5 years, Jeff Dean for having dinner with me in Singapore (and reminding me that Google is great!) and Katelyn, my recruiter who stayed in touch with me for 1+ years!

I am excited to be back.