<aside> 📓 just trying to have a net-positive effect on the world
Video Generation @ OpenAI
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<aside> 📫 @willdepue on every platform [email protected] and +1 (***) *** **** (just email me)
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<aside> 🏫 Prev. CS at UMich 25' (dropped out, on leave). First graduating class at Geffen Academy of UCLA (2021, Salutatorian). Eagle Scout (SPL). Born in 2003.
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<aside> 🦆 Projects
Sora
I contributed to Sora, OpenAI’s first text-to-video model. Read more about Sora in the technical report “Video generation models as world simulators.” I’ve attached some of my favorite samples (which I created) below.
Sora: Creating video from text
Video generation models as world simulators
In this sample, I use SDEdit and some prompting tricks to transform a Sora-generated video of a car driving up a mountain road and through a tunnel into new environments while keeping the core movement and physics the same.
This is the base video, which, by the way, is also entirely generated by Sora.
This is the base video, which, by the way, is also entirely generated by Sora.
“Change the setting to be in a lush jungle”
“Change the setting to be in a lush jungle”
“Let’s move outside of a forest, perhaps Joshua Tree?”
“Let’s move outside of a forest, perhaps Joshua Tree?”
“Make the video in a pixel art style”
“Make the video in a pixel art style”
“Recreate the video in a medieval style”
“Recreate the video in a medieval style”
In this sample, I inpaint a DALLE-3 generated image as the first frame of a video and bring it to life with Sora.
I created this sample when working on video inpainting, where I chose to inpaint the start of a Sora-generated video of someone mountain biking at both the start and the end of the video, forcing Sora to create a perfect loop. Unfortunately, Notion seems to break the video and cause a skip. Will fix ASAP.
Ephemeral Notes
This is an experiment in trying to provide the great benefit of mental tools, like typing out thoughts or sketching on a whiteboard, without offering the often misleading nature of such, whether infinitely branching different ideas without penalty, leaning on visual structure and organization as a substitute for true clarity, or the danger of accidentally only copying down instead of thinking.
Ephemeral is a disappearing notepad: where all of your notes slowly fade over time. This tool is intended to be used as you are deep in thought and want to boost your working memory, need to sketch something out when you can’t picture it in your head, or need to channel your stream of consciousness. All words take 60 seconds to fully disappear. If you want to keep something, feel free to write it again - the same way you would call a thought back from memory.
FIGMA-OS
The first Turing-complete computer built entirely in Figma. 8-bit architecture, 512 bits of RAM, 16 bytes of Program Memory, MISC instruction set of 16 OPCODES, 10HZ clock speed, 4 fast access registers, binary-tree RAM/ROM memory.
I was scrolling Twitter at 1 AM on Wednesday night when I saw Figma had released new prototyping tools: which included conditionals and integer/binary variables. I realized that Figma was now probably Turing complete and knew I had to be the first to build a full computer on the platform. Stayed up till 6 AM ‘coding’ along with a couple other late nights, super fun.
FIGMA-OS: TURING-COMPLETE COMPUTER IN FIGMA
The Alexandria Index
Most of my projects come from me building what I wished already existed in the world. I was surprised that, given the low cost and high value of embeddings, there were very few open embedding datasets to be found. What started as a joke of “why don’t we just embed it all ourselves” quickly became a reality.
Alexandria is a project to build free, open-source, up-to-date embedding datasets from public information. To start, we released the embeddings for every research paper on Arxiv.org: over 4m items, 600m tokens, and 3.07 billion vector dimensions.
We’re planning on embedding other large datasets, as well as launching free embedding search products for each in the following weeks. Download/vote for new datasets ↓
WebGPT After looking around for a project that would require me to learn and fully understand some part of the AI space, I stumbled upon implementing a GPT model in the browser with the new WebGPU API. Knowing nothing about how transformers/kernels/training worked, it was a perfect project.
WebGPT lets you run GPT models completely natively on the browser with WebGPU. It’s also an implementation of GPT inference in less than ~1500 lines of vanilla Javascript, intended as a proof-of-concept as well as an educational resource.
Currently has ⭐️ 2.7k stars on Github. Announcement kinda went viral. I built this project in less than two weeks, starting from no prior knowledge.
Hyperlocal: Peer-to-Peer Bluetooth Messaging
When the internet goes down from war, disaster, or gov. shutdowns, Hyperlocal restores communication by building a distributed network of Bluetooth-connected mobile phones. This form of mesh-network messaging is uncensorable, untraceable, and universal.
We’re partnering with activist organizations, humanitarian non-profits, and world governments to bring connectivity to those who need it most. This is InternetActivism’s first infrastructure-level project, which I’ve led from start to finish.
InternetActivism, a non-profit organization.
There exist countless organizations around the world who focus on creating invaluable localized impact, but they are not set up to work well with the fast response, low-risk, and experimental nature of digital technology.
InternetActivism is a new generation of activist organization, capable of instantly deploying digital solutions from thousands of miles away, on the fraction of the budget of similar organizations.
We need your help:
DeepResearch
What started as me poking around Discord’s API and playing with downloaded server message data became DeepResearch, the leading analytics platform on Discord.
The first relationship graph I rendered, used the Gen Z Mafia server history. (Sep 2021)
Rendered two distinct communities together. You can see intersecting community members & cross-server friendships.
I started by screwing around with Discord’s shockingly relaxed API, seeing what I could create. After my relationship graphs received a surprising amount of attention, I recruited three of my friends to turn what was a local Python script into a product. Over the course of the first 6 months, DeepResearch had analyzed 36 million unique community users and stored over 100 million data points.
This was our main analytics overview paged, designed to give the user an at-a-glance understanding of their community health, something we found far better than overly-specific breakdowns of esoteric metrics.
Relationship analysis was a big part of our product. Unlike any other product on the platform, we had the ability to give you near-live relationship graphs of your entire community (even up to 500k+ members). I’m quite proud of the analytics pipeline we built to scalably calculate these graphs.
We had to teach ourselves nearly everything from scratch: I taught myself front-end and back-end development in a month, learned Figma to design every part of the app, as well as build a server architecture that scaled to extreme throughput through pure trial-and-error. I naively wrote the first version of our analytics aggregation stack entirely by hand.
DeepResearch received an acquisition offer from Commsor less than six months after being incorporated. We closed the deal in February 2022, and worked to bring the product to enterprise customers over the following year.
The Human Colossus
I once helped manage a community of young builders and creators called the Gen Z Mafia, the community which helped me get started building and ultimately found my cofounders for DeepResearch. I jumped when the opportunity came to help restart and upscale its mission.
As a part of this, I’ve conducted a series of interviews with some other amazing young builders. Start here:
Avi Schiffmann // nCovid2019.live, UkraineTakeShelter, Learning to Build.
Speaking at V1 Michigan
Feel pretty good about this talk I gave at Michigan last year. Discuss a lot of my building philosophy and my advice to people in high school/college who want to create.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV1Ct5fSBtE
Plagiarism.fyi One-week Project
Broke MOSS, the code plagiarism detection algorithm used across every college. MOSS was so trivial to beat that I was worried about publishing my findings. Considering there were others who had heard about my project, I found a more constructive way to release this project.
Launched plagiarism.fyi a tool to help students beat MOSS: But there's a catch: every user is also quietly helping us build a dataset on which to build a better system.
A new system and research paper is releasing in early to mid 2023 (sorry coordinating group research is slow). There’s serious ethical concerns regarding this project which I’ve discussed on the site - the domain is intentionally satirical - and I stand by my work.
Read the article: How code plagiarism checking works… and how to beat it.
Plagiarism.fyi - Beat your school's code plagiarism checker
ChessEngines.org One-week Project Built a chess engine over a week using JS first, then learned Golang. Stopped early, but engine is rated 2100+ ELO.
Built chessengines.org, an interactive guide to Chess AIs. Website has over 2.1 million hits so far, hit the top of HackerNews and was in a bunch of newsletters. Recently, it won top #25 in the 3Blue1Brown math communication competition, and the top #5 written submissions. Pretty cool!
Chess Engines: A Zero to One Guide
CanvasOfBabel.com One-hour Project
One-off project I built in an hour or so. A friend tweeted about building a visual version of the Library of Babel, the infinite random letter library that contains all written word, so I did. Not searchable, yet. Built using p5.js and threw it on Vercel.
This is the #1 result on Google lol.
https://www.canvasofbabel.com/
CollegeTunnels.com One-week Project ****Restored an old internet library for underground university tunnels. Recovered from the internet archive. Hosts maps, guides, stories and more about students exploring the tunnels under nearly every college campus. Fun mini project.
Send me your tunnel stories @ [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]?subject=I%20have%20a%20story)!
The Library of University Tunnels
Recompiled.fyi One-week Project ****Built a paid newsletter service that offloads onboarding friction away from writers. Allows anyone to pre-pay for a monthly subscription, giving incentive to people too busy to start a newsletter. Shut down because Stripe thought it was money laundering. Unfortunate.
Original idea came from this tweet:
MyFirstNDA.com My magnum opus.
A non-disclosure agreement template for teenage girls who need to legally silence their friends from spreading rumors. Fill it out and print in less than 2 minutes. Completely valid one-way non-disclosure contract that I’ve used before (disclaimer: is very pink).
Topics: Figma, ReactJS.
Polaroid
A game that plays with physics and perspective. Took an intro CS course in high school, decided to go all out for the final project. Still one of the hardest projects I’ve completed, quite difficult to engineer complex 3-dimension transforms in Processing.
JampackedScholarlyApatosaur-mobile (1).mp4
A fun fact is that I couldn’t render both 2D and 3D objects, so the viewfinder in front of your face is actually a 3D transparent rectangle. You can see it clip into walls haha.
ConstitutionDAO
Failed to buy the constitution with 42 million dollars with the ConstitutionDAO. Weirdest couple days of my life.
Gen Z Mafia Helped build the Gen Z Mafia community. Ran events, built the community to over 6000 members, led admissions.
Gen Zers Say Silicon Valley Is Elitist and Exclusive. Can They Build a New System?
Divorcify.org One-week Project A photoshop service that digitally removes your significant other from old pictures. Somewhat joke project, somewhat not. Shut down, didn’t have time to manage.
Divorcify - Erase Your Undesirables
Minecraft Computers Got into building computers in Minecraft and accidentally ended up teaching myself computer architecture. Hard to understate how much I learned in this project. Built the first Redstone computer only using pistons. Proudest achievement.
https://packaged-media.redd.it/dp5dkk9ereh51/pb/m2-res_720p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1690070400&s=de14a0888c6644fd83885ab3b613ab6e408db3b4#t=0
First Piston-Only Minecraft Computer - (Not a single redstone torch or comparator)
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<aside> 🏗️ Startups
Community infrastructure doesn't exist, let's build it. Analytics, tooling, and more for community builders: altr.fyi (2021-2022) (Acquired by Commsor)
Built an 4 person engineering team from scratch (fully remotely), did all design & product work, created an analytics product with 2.5 million tracked users & 30 RPS. Co-Founder and CEO. Started in high school and sold the startup from my dorm room in a seven-figure acquisition. Raised $0.
Email sucks for teacher → student communication in high schools, replace it with instant messaging: thrive.fyi (2020-2021)
Raised, built and launched messaging product for high school communication. Hired 2 engineers. Founder, started in high school.
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