The most interesting things I collected in 2025 and some future thoughts
My projects
At Lyft I was working on AI earnings assistant, LLMs, Go, ML/AI engineering. In my free time:
AI for Science
I got very inspired by this paper from google that came out mid February, and also from FutureHouse and Sakana.ai. My own progression:
- Openreview For PaperQA to ask what projects were done in ICLR
- Paper To Project that defines the vision (create new incremental projects and match them with people that have relevant skills) and creates a first batch of projects
- Ranking With LLMs to know what project from hundreds to work on
Several people reached out to me and started to work on some projects, mostly in AI interpretability area, but it proved to be difficult to align everyone’s incentives.
- Categories of AI Research Ideas to know what projects are the most beneficial to help with LLMs
- NeoBERT Fine-Tuning to train a model to predict the categories above
- AI 4 Life Science Learnings from the conference in Vienna where I talked to many scientists and saw their problems (it’s a lot about tooling)
- And finally, Papers To Datasets where I built an AI agent to extract structured data from a scientific graph
The biggest roadblock was to talk to scientists and validate project ideas, there wasn’t a good reward for my own RL system to understand in what direction I have to apply the most of my free time. I had to reach out a lot, which is frustrating, as I worked at places where people already know you’re doing a great job and reach out to you instead, so you always know the most pressing problems to solve. My PhD friends say this was the hardest part of their PhD time, to stay focused and learn how to motivate yourself when there’s no outside pressure, which is way different from an industry job.
Weekend projects and essays
I have lots of Project Ideas, and sometimes I have an inspirational moments to just try to build the first version quickly, here’s a list of some of them in no order:
- Voice Cloning locally for a project to create youtube essays from a wikipedia deep dives (now almost solved with NotebookLM)
- An essay about Personal Agency that many liked
- Finding Obscure Places for a Road Trip
- Music Taste And LLMs (Music taste is (also) a next token prediction)
- NeurIPS 2025 competitions:
- Improving QA LLMs
- The implementation of Test Time Diffusion paper by Google with some tweaks to run on 24gb GPU
- I’ve also tried this competition about Early Training Evaluation of Language Models and even created some datasets, but their evaluation system returned errors and I had to reach out via discord to slowly debug them, lesson: get into good challenges early?
- What Is Hacker News Working On?
- Generate a Fog Of War map from Google location data locally in browser
- IMDb wrapped for a Recaps List
- I took part in project number five from Summer of AI Research, Literature Knowledge Extraction Tool. Final PRs are merged into this github repo and now it’s an analysis phase I probably forgot some smaller ones, and I mostly do these for fun and to check if there are cool people working on these too
Best of
Books
Summary: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2025/53179157
- Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1)
- Nexus (Nexus, #1)
- Chainsaw Man, One Piece and Dandadan
- Unfortunately no worthy non-fictions :( I have a feeling the best new content is online in essays nowadays
Articles
It’s hard to decide, I was very inspired by some of those but looking back I just read them in a right time. Anyway:
- Indefinite Backpack Travel
- An amazing video: Towards Consciousness Engineering by Max Hodak which I liked so much I want to write down my own thoughts on this topic, but it’s very hard! I only wrote Towards Consciousness Engineering so far
- How to do the jhanas and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana
- Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
- Richard Feynman’s Letter on What Problems to Solve, and another longer post about his work on the connection machine
- 95%-ile isn’t that good
- A (very long) book review about Georgism/land value tax, can spark lots of discussions about landlords and public goods.
- When each proud fighter brags
- An Opinionated Guide to ML Research
Podcasts
- Philosophize This!: Episode #220 … Dostoevsky - Demons
- How to Have Good Ideas
- Is it ok to just work all the time?
- Sakana AI from MLST
- Serendipity, weird bets, & cold emails that actually work: Career advice from 16 former guests
- Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
YouTube
- This video about research in your free time, and a discord link to join the growing community, very cool!
- The End of Bryan Johnson | Documentary
- The Deepest Dive into Chainsaw Man
- What Every Body Fat % Actually Looks Like (50% to 5%)
- Berlin Veterans
- The best movie 2025 - El secreto de sus ojos
Games
- Dota 2
- Stellaris
- https://openfront.io/
- https://vcmi.eu/
- Baldur’s Gate 3