• Building 🪄 DreamLoom & Contributing to MC-Bench
• ex-Senior Software Engineer @ Instacart
• Previously interned at Coinbase, SeatGeek, PagerDuty and 2 other companies.
• CS at University of Waterloo

Details: https://linkedin.com/in/nikshepsvn

My goal is to build technology that accelerates human progress, allowing for a world where people can earn with creativity instead of labour. Currently, I'm heads down building an innovative, creator-focused platform that is the first step in my journey.

I have been closely following the AI/LLM/Diffusion space since it's inception. RealmPlay, my project-turned-company that was acquired, was built on a fine-tuned, block-merged version of Llama, 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.

Some other recent projects I've explored in the space, which gave me significant learnings, include:

• SoulBazaar - an LLM fine-tune community and marketplace prototype powered by LoRAX
  • LoRAs, syntethic data generation, fine-tuning, SGMV kernel, tool-calling etc.
• ThumbGen - a YouTube Thumbnail Design Copilot (launched, got 10+ paying customers before ramping it down to focus)
  • Diffusion, DiT architecture, generative UI, ComfyUI, IP-Adapter, structured output, prompting techniques etc.
• Misc hacking (blog writer agent, video understanding via frame-extraction etc.)
  • Agentic behavior, embedding, RAG, multimodality, etc.

I have a long history building & learning things outside my professional work, some notable projects include:

• Crypto Development & Mining (2016): mined ETH at $35/token, dev for token w/ $50M+ peak marketcap
  • crypto fundamentals, PoW/PoS, smart contract development, marketing/branding etc.
• Multiple Hackathons (2017, 2018): won prize for headband solution to prevent car accidents, while building at 10+ events
  • built various products and learnt about different core areas, from PHP, app development to cloud and hardware
• AnimeLootStore (early 2019): dropshipped anime merch, ran ads, did 100+ orders
  • design/positioning/branding, marketing via facebook/google Ads, finances, customer experience etc.
• FuzzPandaFilms (late 2019): YT channel automated w/ reddit content, reached 10M views, 16K subscribers
  • data parsing + processing, programatic video generation, youtube optimization etc.
• Automated Instagram Pages (2020): bot to scrape for viral content and repost on instagram, reaching 5000+ followers
  • web scraping, data processing / management, APIs etc.

While my professional background is largely with Data / Infrastructure / Fullstack engineering, my personal experiences and interests in the AI realm, via building products and following forums like /r/LocalLLama, /r/StableDiffusion and X have led to me building an extremely strong and broad foundation in applied AI engineering -- with a solid understanding of model architectures & fundamentals (ssm + transformers + diffusion etc.), fine-tuning (full/LoRA/qLoRA), syntethic data generation pipelines, vector databases / RAG, prompt engineering, agentic behavior/frameworks, structured output, generative UI, evals and other subject matter.

I stay up to date with the bleeding-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