Recent content on Advay Pal
Early last year, I was approved for the EB-1A. Since then, I’ve had the honour of helping dozens of friends with their own EB-1A / O-1A applications. This post details my own journey, along with the resources I used. If there’s anything to take away from this post, it’s that with enough effort anyone can get an EB-1A, and that if a friend / lawyer / family member / neighbourhood…
If you’ve spent enough time with me in recent years, you would know that I am a huge admirer of Lee Kuan Yew. 1 As the founding prime minister of Singapore, he is most well known for transforming the city state from a fishing village into a nation with one of the highest GDP per capitas in the world. He embodies many of the traits that I aspire to possess - intellect, independent thought,…
A question that people, especially those facing similar choices, tend to ask me is why I chose to get a master’s degree in Computer Science (CS). In March 2019, when I was deciding between coming to Stanford for a CS master’s vs job offers, I had listed down a bunch of thoughts that eventually became my reasons for embarking upon the road to graduate school. Inspired by my friend…
Negotiation is an incredibly valuable life skill. Here’s an excerpt from my favourite book on negotiation (more about the book below): While you might be curious how FBI negotiators get some of the world’s toughest bad guys to give up their hostages, you could be excused for wondering what hostage negotiation has to do with your life. Happily, very few people are ever forced to deal with…
Paul Graham, has an essay where he identifies what he thinks is the defining trait of good startup founders: A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. Till then the best I’d managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good…
When I tell people I grew up in India but went to college in Singapore, the natural question that follows is why. People also ask why I chose to study computer science (CS) in college, especially if they know I was a physics nerd in high school. The answer to both questions is the same long story, and this is the unabridged version. I’ve also added reflections that the hindsight of 5 years…
Non Fiction Every book here has influenced how I think, either in a big way or a small way. -- -- -- Fiction Restricting to favourites since I've read a lot of fiction.
NUS Hackers Apr '16 - May '19 I was a part of the core team, and later president, of NUS Hackers, a student group dedicated to spreading hacker culture in NUS and Singapore. I helped organise Singapore's largest student-run hackathon, weekly technical talks with industry and academic speakers, technical workshops for 50-100 students, and a mock technical interview initiative. Competitive Football…
Vid2Doc Nov '23 A tool to generate product documentation from demo videos. Built in a team of 2. Medical Records Summarizer Aug '23 A tool to summarize medical records for personal injury lawyers using LLMs. Built in a team of 2. Charty Jul '23 A new kind of dashboarding tool in the world of LLMs. Built in a team of 2.
Engineering Forward Deployed Engineer Modal Labs · Full-time 2024 - 2025 · 1 yr New York City Metropolitan Area Joined the company at ~19 employees, $150mil val (now 100+ employees, $4.5B val). Worked on a multitude of AI-related projects for various customers, including GRPO on LLMs for math and coding Fine-tuning FLUX and optimizing FLUX inference latency Fine-tuning Whisper on…
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes … the ones who see things differently – they’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only…