This blog post is disappointing because I didn’t write a single world of it in 2024. But anyways, I’ll try my best to keep the trend going and be better organized in Q1 of 2025.

Work

OpenAI work ramped up this year, and it was pretty dramatic. I spent most of the year working on the models that became o1-preview and o1. There was a lot of drama around the project, including whether the project would even exist, who would train the production checkpoints and in what codebase, pushback against the o1-preview checkpoint, pushback against the o1 checkpoint and more. I’m still not entirely sure why the project was so dramatic—maybe because it’s a more central project, because it challenged the status quo of non-CoT models, or maybe because I became more political.

On a technical note, what I find super cool about the o1 paradigm is that it seems like a lasting paradigm that will bring us pretty close to AGI; and it’s extremely general and anything that can be graded can be optimized. Perhaps the missing piece here is self-improvement or continuous improvement, and maybe that’s the last paradigm, but even without that it feels like we can get close to AGI with what we have now.

Reflecting back, what I’m disappointed in myself in is that I feel like I did not really grow technically and was primarily focused on execution and career progression. Maybe that’s OK for some periods of time where there’s a lot to gain, but hopefully I can focus more on improving my abilities this year. I also feel like I didn’t orient myself well in OpenAI from an interpersonal perspective, and I want to improve that.

One sad thing about OpenAI is that a lot of the researchers who inspired me, like John Schulman, Barret, Luke Metz, Andrej, had all left the team.

Health

My health this year was just OK, not great. The good news is that I remained relatively injury thoughout the times that I played soccer.

One new thing that I am going to try regarding my health is to be more evaluation-focused on treating my health issues. The two biggest health issues I have now are that airflow through my nose is not good and my teeth are grinding at night. For nasal airflow, there is a pretty decent solution, which is to use measure peak nasal inspiratory flow (PNIF) with an instrument, and see whether it changes with allergy medication. For TMJ, I will probably need to rely on measuring symptoms and also looking at placement on CBCT scans.

Travel

I made three trips this year which were all pretty fun.

Rome. Karina and I spent 10 days in Rome. The city is just beautiful and rich in history. There were so many restaurants within walking distance, all serving tasty pasta and pizza. For the last few days, Zou Kai came by and we all hung out.

The highlights of Rome were:

• Six senses hotel Roman Baths was by far the nicest bath house I’ve been to, would absolutely going again.
• Pompeii was like traveling back in time and it was great to imagine the history of the past; wish I could have had some psychedelics.
• The Vatican Museum is the pinncale of visual luxury; the whole hall is decorated with pure art, with maximum visual enjoyment per square meter.

Left, with Karina at Pompeii; middle, a random restaurant; right, with Zou Kai at the Vatican museum.

Vienna. I went to Vienna for the ICLR conference. I remember being super excited to catch up with Jerry even though he was pretty stressed out about his interviews with Anthropic. Vienna was a super livable city, with a lot of things in walking distance and super safe at night. In Vienna, we had a few fun activities like eating at very old restaurants, visiting the Mozart Museum, going to an Opera-style concert (during which I had a nice nap), and getting drunk at the OpenAI party.

Vancouver. Going to Vancouver for NeurIPS was a nice trip even though work was still pretty stressful at that time. It was great to catch up with old friends like Quoc, Yifeng, and Andrew Dai. We all went to hot pot and Japanese restaurants.

Left, with Jerry at Griechenbeisl; middle, with Jerry and Karina at a classical music concert; right, with Jerry and Karina at the Vancouver Christmas Market.

My first soccer game

With Karina, I went to my first soccer game in Houston for my birthday. It was Argentina vs Equador for the COPA America cup. I decided that it would be worth going because it was close by, Messi might retire soon, and I would be able to see the other Argentinian players that I had watched so many times in videos. Tickets were around $700.

As I described in a tweet, the lessons I learned were:

• The athleticism of players is more amazing in person than on TV. The way people run is different from regular people. Their movements are explosive. Epecially Enner Valencia, the way he runs is so powerful and natural.
• I’ve always found it cool to see experts doing simple things, such as when great programmers just navigate a terminal. It was cool to see soccer pros, experts in their craft, do simple things like receive a simple pass such that they are facing the right way.
• Messi sucked that game. Only got on the ball a few times, then was the only Argentine player to miss the penalty. He came off injury though so guess it was a quiet night
• I felt that I didn’t know enough about soccer to fully appreciate all the nuances I saw in person. E.g., my first time watching pro tennis in person was profound, because I was good enough at tennis to comprehend how hard the things they did were. Should study more next time.
• Never seen people in the world so passionate about something as soccer. The Argentine kids next to us, from Argentina, went to 3 group stage games and stay in the US. How do so many people afford tickets to games like this? Even as an American $700 is a lot.

Other

In other fun memories, I enjoyed a one-day workshop 2024 Scale AI Base Camp at Montage Healdsburg, where I had a super fun dinner with Hugh Zhang and Tim Brooks. I also enjoyed going to Princeton and UPenn for a talk, where it was very refreshing to meet students, who had contagious, unfiltered energy and excitement about AI.

Left, family picture; left-middle, o1-preview-preview-preview; middle, Scale AI Base Camp dinner; right-middle, Argentina vs Equador game; right, OpenAI holiday party with Jerry.