about.qmd

---
title: "Keith Stevens"
image: assets/img/profile-photo.jpg 
about:
  template: jolla
  links:
    - icon: threads
      text: Threads
      href: https://threads.net/fozziethebeat
    - icon: github 
      text: Github
      href: https://www.github.com/fozziethebeat
    - icon: linkedin
      text: LinkedIn
      href: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fozziethebeat/
---

With 20 years practicing Buddhism and 15 years working in Natural Language
Processing, I firmly believe language technology works best when it helps
people live economically better lives so they can spend more time building and
enjoying the human relationships that give life meaning.  More so, the best
solutions come from teams that focus deeply on a poignant market problem and
solve it with relentless focus.  And that’s what I hope to keep doing.

Over 9 years I worked with the google translate team as we did exactly that for
machine translation.  We got to live through the paradigm shift from old school
statistical NLP to large transformer models, being one of the first teams in
Google to productionize transformer models.  With my direct teams we built
systems that discovered, curated, and housed the vast pools of data needed to
train these models.  And with a small team I personally led we build out user
facing features that let users share data and insights with us.

Since leaving Google I spent the last two years seeing the startup world up
close.  I tried replicating some of my Google work as an open source project.
Partnered with a co-founder to try  making an emotional intelligence oriented
AI startup.  I’ve since been working with several startups to build out their
LLM infused products.  Until mid 2024, I plan to continue doing this will
splitting my time between Tokyo and Hakuba Japan.  In my spare time I'll also
be skiing and writing mini reports on various LLM adjacent open source projects
that catch my interest.

After the middle of 2024, I expect to relocate from Japan to either the SF Bay
Area or Los Angeles while my wife studies for her MBA.  While in the states, I
hope to find a solid team to join more permanently to make sure LLMs are
useful.  If that's you, let me know.