Amir Kiani
One of my not-so-secret fantasies has been to become a professional chef. I’m sure that I’m not alone :) Cooking beautifully ties science, art, and culture together. I learned to cook from my mom, who is an incredible chef. Having a lovingly slow-cooked meal with great ingredients can easily become among a person’s most cherished life experiences. Lately I’ve been thinking…
Rana took this photo of me jumping around inside Marta Minujin's mattress-padded room installation at Copenhagen Contemporary. It felt like an apt description for this post. Life is a series of experiments. After 14 years of working for others, building my own company was a long-awaited experiment that had always piqued my interest. This is a brief summary of what I’ve learned trying this…
TL;DR : I spent 9 months building LLM-powered apps to help cancer patients navigate clinical care—chatbots with EHR integrations, appointment prep tools, and iOS apps (that Apple kept rejecting). I found real use cases and built working prototypes, but I discovered that LLMs aren’t ready for safe clinical use by patients. The core structural issues—context building, grounding, and…
Note: This post is going to be i m p er f ect in so many ways. And that’s probably ok. A picture I took during our recent trip to the truly beautiful Grand Teton National Park About 2 years ago, after months of dealing with chronic stomach ache and digestive problems, I finally managed to get my gastroenterologist (GI) specialist at UCSF to prescribe me an endoscopy and colonoscopy. Before then,…
“Curb Your Enthusiasm,” created by Larry David TL;DR: I explored the journey of fine-tuning two small LLMs: Llama 3.1-8B-Instruct vs GPT-3.5-Turbo on a fun dataset of GPT-4o generated conversations in the style of Larry David. All the code for this project and evaluation results are openly accessible. This approach could provide a major cost/latency/privacy advantage if one is interested in small…
TL;DR: I built AI Dialer , a full stack Python app for interruptible and near-human quality AI phone calls by stitching LLMs, speech understanding tools, text-to-speech models, and Twilio’s phone API. This post is a long-form companion piece to this repository on Github . AI Dialer's web user interface Your browser does not support the audio tag. Example audio recording with AI Dialer Background…
I am a curious builder. Tinkering with technology has been a hobby of mine since I was nine and I am grateful that I’ve been able to turn this passion into a profession. Born and raised in Isfahan , I studied Computer Science for my undergraduate (University of Minnesota) and graduate studies (Stanford). Through the last decade and a half, I have worn many different professional hats –…
I have been writing for most of my life. I recently realized that most of my professional writings are owned by and hidden behind the corporations where I have worked at through my career. And as for my personal writings, they have become buried in numerous social media accounts and mostly inaccessible given the sheer volume of noise in these systems. While this is not my first attempt at blogging…
📪 Newsletter If you are interested in receiving updates about this blog or my other life projects via occasional emails, please sign up for my newsletter by filling the form below. You will of course be able to unsubscribe in future in case you did not find the content interesting 😊