About Me

I'm Alex. I just finished my M.S. in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (AI) at Arizona State University, on the back of a B.S. in Computer Science there. My primary career interest is AI interpretability research; I enjoy working on software projects the rest of the time.

What I'm passionate about

I've been interested in AI well before LLMs and the modern wave - I think the question of intelligence is the most interesting question there is, perhaps of all time. I want to understand how the brain encodes and handles information so we can replicate similar structures, at a useful level of abstraction, on machines. Inspired by Cortana from Halo and JARVIS from Iron Man, I imagine a world where everyone has a personal assistant and friend of that caliber, helping them navigate this increasingly complex world.

The bridge from here to there, I think, runs through mechanistic interpretability. Today's models are a remarkable step, but a step; getting from them to anything Cortana-shaped means understanding what they're actually doing internally, so we can iterate on architectures intelligently rather than by trial and error. My thesis sits in that space - putting a geometric bound on how many features a transformer's latent space can actually represent - and it's the direction I want to keep pushing.

More generally, I believe modern technology is our world's magic and we take it for granted constantly. We manipulate the base laws of the universe to our advantage - we transform rocks into metal, carve with light, communicate instantly across continents. We use this stuff daily and never stop to consider how incredible it all is.

Some of my projects

• Home lab - an OPNsense router, a TrueNAS box hosting personal media, photos, a password manager, and custom Docker apps, plus spare desktop compute hosting game servers (mostly Minecraft) over WSL and wake-on-LAN.
• RPLib - a relational-positioning SVG diagramming library, published as three npm packages with a browser editor.
• Minecraft mods - a couple of published mods on Modrinth and CurseForge, both open source.
• Wynncraft tooling - contributions to open source tools for the MMORPG.
• WynnSolver - a Wynncraft build optimizer with a full combo simulator, yielding results on a ~10²⁰ search space of equipment combinations in seconds.

The rest of my free time

• Climbing. Rock climbing and bouldering. I competed on my university team and made it to the national collegiate finals for men's intermediate division.
• Cooking. I make most of my own food and occasionally enjoy some culinary experimentation.
• Drones. I fly recreationally and have some decent footage and photos.
• Reading. Fantasy and sci-fi - Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series sit at the top of the list.
• Watching. Oblivion and Villeneuve's Dune on the movie side; The Pitt and Love, Death & Robots on TV; Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vinland Saga, and Apothecary Diaries on the anime side.
• Games. League of Legends with friends (Diamond), a lot of Minecraft, and an all-time list that includes Hollow Knight and Silksong, CrossCode, and PlanetSide 2.

Cooking

I'm no chef, but every once in a while I make something I'm proud of.

Drones