Zhiwei Decides to Shift His Focus to Machine Learning | Original

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Financial Situation

Life is tough. After dropping out of university after his first year in July 2014, Zhiwei has been working and studying in society for 9 years. He remembers that at that time, he came to Kunshan, China, a city near Shanghai. He was passionate, curious, and energetic. One day, after he logged off work, he met some people on the road trying to sell him houses. The price was around 7,000 CNY per square meter. As he had just started working as an intern software engineer, was busy learning things, and had just gotten his first salary of around 4,800 CNY, he didn’t listen to them. He thought that was quite expensive and that they were somehow cheating him. Now, he knows that those people were doing him a favor at that time because the price of those houses has climbed to around 27,000 CNY per square meter.

In retrospect, and in essence, he didn’t have enough life experience to foresee things and knew little about how society works. Fortunately, he has learned so many things in these 9 years. He has tried so many things and made a lot of errors. But just like what he said, he now sees errors as lessons, as wealth. As long as one is healthy and has not gotten into much debt, everything can be started over. If you lose friends, you can make new ones. If you lose your job, you can find a new one. You just have to find things to do to live in this world. And you have to get busy to fight off slight depression or permissiveness that arises from the troubles of living itself.

Though Zhiwei made a financial mistake by not buying a house earlier, after 9 years, he can buy a house with the help of his family, together with his wife. And no matter how frustrating life might be sometimes, he can accompany his 2-year-old daughter to get some relief and true happiness. The even better news is that he recently moved into his new house. He is happy to find that he was wrong before, too; the big house is much better than a small rented room. The more physical space gives you more opportunities to do things or enjoy life better by buying a lot of home appliances and letting them work for you.

The bad news is that he has to carry a debt of 1.2 million CNY. Though it is acceptable when considering the value of the house, the financial assets of his family are around 1 million CNY, and his family is still able to face some risks. And because he is tired of working on cloud computing in his daily job and studying AI in his leisure time, and somehow most of the companies in the world are behind the AI progress of open-source communities and OpenAI, he decided to leave his current job to find new job opportunities, while also doing a road trip.

When you read this, you may understand that Zhiwei is a person who wants to have a lot of freedom. He has worked hard in his 28 years of life, and he thinks he deserves that. Due to his long-term strategy and honest response to the current trends of the world these years, he has started to make correct decisions for himself again and again. He suggested that people shouldn’t buy houses in China in 2019. In retrospect, he was right; the price of houses in 2019 was probably the highest in these 10 years in China. He started to learn English actively in 2019, and today, he has proven himself to be able to work at global companies. He has done it for almost two years, though it has been 1.5 years working in English and around half a year interviewing in English.

In the original plan, he wanted to learn cloud computing in the company and stay long. However, he got distracted by AI. Though he can learn machine learning algorithms just in his leisure time and make progress, he got too tired. So he decides to leave the company and find new job opportunities as a Machine Learning Engineer. Why did Zhiwei quit the company first instead of finding a job first and then quitting? It is that the world is changing so fast now. As Zhiwei says, most companies are falling behind the AI progress of open-source communities and OpenAI.

So he wants to jump in quickly to start working on it full-time. He isn’t an independent developer who can do products alone to make a living, so he was unable to work on it anytime, including in the first months after ChatGPT came out around the end of November 2022. It is fine. The companies have existing businesses to work on. They have 10,000 or even 100,000 employees. He knows that, as he has already worked for four big companies, including two outsourcing agency companies and two banks. And the big companies are also different. There are a lot of projects, a lot of leads, a lot of employees, a lot of priorities, and a lot of policies to deal with. So they have done nothing wrong. It is just that open source and OpenAI are very fast and forward-thinking. And Zhiwei now is also fast and forward-thinking.

AI, I Am Coming!

So he did it by quitting first, and also because he got tired of working and studying at the same time, he needs rest. He will do a road trip, probably to Tibet. He has never been there, though he has always wanted to go there to explore. It is the best time for him to do so. When facing a big change in life, he needs to go to a dream place to think and to plan.

Everyone is different in some ways, and everyone’s life progress is different, too. Some people may be just starting to know AI and beginning to use AI tools today, as people around them always mention it. And some have already worked on it for 10 years. And Zhiwei has been working on it in his leisure time for 1 year. So here, Zhiwei just shares lessons with people like him. He doesn’t mislead anyone. As he always mentions, he wants to do good for himself, his family, his friends, his Internet readers, and the world.

Just like his crazy ways to make bilingual videos to publish on some big social networks globally to help people learn English, including LinkedIn and WeChat Platform. Some people might be offended or uncomfortable because they are unable to speak English as fluently as Zhiwei. They say it is not important. They say it is too troublesome. Life is already very hard. Why does Zhiwei keep telling them they are still not as excellent as him, so they need to study more? That mistake has happened in Zhiwei’s life time after time.

Zhiwei decided today, too, that he will change only himself without trying to change others anymore. He will not change his wife, his parents, his friends, his readers, or his daughter. He will treat other people just like he treats his daughter. He just prepares the iPad and opens YouTube Kids to let his daughter watch English animations in China. And she likes it, and it is fine. If she doesn’t want to watch it, it is okay. As he already knows that the kids of his Indian, Singaporean, and Hong Kong colleagues are very good at speaking English, he wants his daughter to be able to be confident to talk and work with them when she grows up. And he still has conflicts with his parents about this. His parents want the baby girl to watch Chinese animations. One reason is that Apple TV in China is hard to use because of network problems. Another reason is that his parents think it is not urgent for her now to learn English.

However, Zhiwei knows that it is not much effort. He is okay with setting up a mobile phone in the car and letting his daughter watch English animations along the journey. Though he is not able to help his daughter watch English animations on the big TV in his parents’ home because, in the recent year, his parents have lived in different buildings in the apartment complex. He will only come to his parents’ home to have dinner meals. And his parents are worrying a lot about him leaving his current job and also couldn’t understand Zhiwei’s AI passion and learning passion, so Zhiwei will tell them his message with this article, too.

Zhiwei is totally living on the Internet. He does most things online. His body is walking and sitting in the physical world, with his mind always connecting to the Internet, the global information.

Why does Zhiwei want to do AI? That’s a long story. First, he found that he can do machine learning in easy ways, like printing variables to learn the dimensions of the variables in neural networks. And just like he says, he is an information geek now after he started programming in 2008 in his first year of junior middle school. It has been 15 years.

What’s the intrinsic principle behind Zhiwei’s plan about all things? One is that he wants to learn for the rest of his life for the best interests of his life. By doing so, he and his family can have a good living. And Zhiwei has a lot of fun on the journey. Though learning is usually painful, however, the exciting moments from time to time are very wonderful. And after some time learning a topic, you find that your brain is very sharp, and you feel very fulfilled. That’s how Zhiwei feels after listening to Japanese short videos for several months; now he is very comfortable listening to the sound of Japanese, though he doesn’t know the meaning.

So about his job plan, it is that he wants to do interviews from time to time in the next weeks. Though he might be doing the road trip himself, he is happy to do some AI interviews to share his ideas or learnings about AI, machine learning, and neural networks. He knows how every line of code works in the neural network for recognizing handwritten digits. He knows about it; he just knows about it. He just understood every detail recently with super happiness. He just has around 1 year of machine learning leisure-time experience. But he thinks he surely will find one of the best jobs in the current market due to his learning ability, skills, and software engineering experience.

Now, I won’t show my previous employers or my educational background on the first page of my resume. After writing this, I decided to move my skills and tools paragraphs in the resume to the top, as I always want to use the best ways to do things. I will pick the details of my skills and tools here from my resume to show here.

Skills and Tools

I have gained a lot of skills since I started programming in 2008. Let’s look at my skills from a high level.

Besides skills, let’s look at the tools I have used. They are detailed tools that help me to accumulate the above skills, plus other interesting tools. I am still using some of them and can learn for a few days to use the rest of them again.

Job Requirements

The job requirements I am asking for are:

  1. About locations, if it is an on-site position, I need it to be in Guangzhou. If it is a remote position, then anywhere is fine. But I am only able to take Earth positions. Because I don’t trust the story about humans going to the moon around the 1970s.
  2. My long-time role models are Paul Graham, Steve Jobs, Yin Wang, Dan Friedman, John Schulman, Greg Brockman, and Sam Altman. I learn from them to do anything in my life since high school. I hope my future boss like them too.
  3. About what I want to do daily: I want it to be about Neural Networks, Transformer, Large Language Training, AI Alignment, NLP, and Python.
  4. About the business, I don’t have a specific one; any business is fine if it helps me gain experience in AI domains.
  5. About the job compensation and benefits, I want the monthly salary to be from 25k to 40k CNY respective to the standard for the market in big cities in China. We can discuss more when we are okay. And regarding the base for a house fund and social insurance, I want it to be not below 20k.
  6. About the language, I prefer to use English. However, if the company only provides a Chinese working environment, it is okay too, as there are no perfect jobs.
  7. Let’s see how I can make it in two months. If it is not realistic, surely I will lower my standards, as I have a flexible mind as long as I achieve my main goal.
  8. As you might see that Zhiwei is a little over confident. So please only contact him if you are okay with working with him. He begins to care less about people’s emotions or relationships. He cares more about the ideas, algorithms, and code.

AI Works

The AI works I have done:

  1. The replication code about the example from the book Neural Networks and Deep Learning; please check out https://github.com/lzwjava/neural-networks-and-zhiwei-learning.
  2. The AI learning articles: Zen and the Art of Machine Learning, https://lzwjava.github.io/zen-neural. I Finally Understand How Neural Networks Work, https://lzwjava.github.io/neural-network.
  3. Did some LLM training and Neural Network training on my laptop. Read the Transformer paper and walked through the code.
  4. To be honest, it is kind of simple. But not that simple, too. I understood the essence that neural networks are nothing about neurons; Machine Learning is nothing about learning. They are all about differentiable computing, calculus, and differentiable programming. The world is wrong about it. They don’t carefully give them correct names as my teacher Yin Wang does.

AI Ideas

  1. To train a large language model on all sensitive data of the company, especially in big companies. So the employees can open and use most of the websites and tools when they input to share. Our LLM model is just smart enough to detect whether it contains sensitive data. They can use Twitter, they can watch YouTube to learn, and they can use GitHub on their company laptops. Why are companies not starting to do it? They might be okay with accepting it as their security VPN has worked like this for 10 years. But now, AI is changing this.

  2. Large language models in all information control areas. I still emphasize that transformers are very smart at analyzing the relationship between words and characters. They have almost the same correctness in categorization as that of people, though they don’t understand a bit. It is all about algorithms. So Zhiwei has a lot of things to do and has a lot of machine learning opportunities in the future. So he can quit his current job though he has 1.2 million in debt.

  3. The domain-specific ChatGPT, like EquitiesGPT, MutualFundsGPT, PaymentGPT, WealthGPT, CryptoGPT, EducationGPT, HouseGPT, KidGPT, GirlGPT, FinanceGPT, PhysicsGPT, HighSchoolGPT, DesignGPT, BookGPT, CommentGPT, NewtonGPT, JapaneseGPT. As ChatGPT just has public information, there is still a lot of information that has not been trained into the models, not fed into the transformer to analyze.

Please Help Me

So I share a lot here. Thank you for your understanding, and I hope this time I still give my readers some new ideas.

And in these two years, I added around a hundred people to WeChat who are HR and recruiters from Boss Zhipin. Please contact me if you are interested. And Zhiwei has 1,000 intimate readers from China, Singapore, USA, Hong Kong, and India. They are a lot like Zhiwei, and a lot are engineers. So if you can help and want to help, please share with me the suitable position information. Thanks much.

Thanks, everyone. Everyone can be achieve excellence if they are free to suspect and think. Our brains are magical. It is innovative, super-talented, a 16-hour-working ChatGPT. And it is able to do critical thinking to make things right and make ideas right.

Thanks again. This is what Zhiwei wants to say today. And he has helped people around him in these years to learn English, work in a global company, become an information geek, and achieve what he has already achieved; he wants to get help back. So friends, please help me with this if you can. Thanks much.

Zhiwei Repost words:

Thank you, my bosses, my colleagues, friends, and family. In these 8 months that have passed, I am happy to have learned about two global cloud platforms and done something for users, bosses, and colleagues in the company while studying machine learning and Japanese in my leisure time. Now, Zhiwei is going to have a new chapter in his life, to become a machine learning engineer. After 28 years of learning and struggling, Zhiwei is tired, but he wants to use his brain to achieve more. He doesn’t have 50 million dollars to start an AI journey like some famous founder in China. He just has his brain with all the public information human beings have ever created, but it is enough. Thank you!

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