The circuit generalized.Held-out modular addition solved.
CPCarson Poole
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Machine learning systems engineer · founder

I like to just do things.

I move quickly from idea to working system—from products used by millions to the kernels beneath the models. Architecture, training, inference, production: whatever it takes to make the thing real.

begin descent

Layer 01 · Generative space

drafted.ai

Founding engineerAug 2025 — Jan 2026
Structure / generation

Trained models to generate floor plans, designed bespoke geometry-processing algorithms, and built infrastructure capable of supporting many concurrent users.

Layer 02 · Inference velocity

avian.io

Inference optimizerFeb 2025 — Apr 2025
World-record throughput

Worked with NVIDIA to optimize DeepSeek R1 inference, setting the world performance record at the time and outperforming specialized hardware systems.

Built custom expert-selection and routing kernels, custom GEMM kernels, and a new quantization specification engineered to minimize error.

Layer 03 · Latent modalities

espresso.ai

Member of technical staffOct 2024 — Aug 2025
Model research

Trained transformer models across unusual modalities—building systems beyond the familiar boundaries of text and image.

Layer 04 · Network scale

forefront.ai

Cofounder & CEOApr 2021 — Oct 2024
From research to millions

Built the first platform for fine-tuning and deploying models such as GPT-J, pioneering multi-LoRA serving roughly a year before open-source implementations caught up.

Reached $131k monthly peak revenue and built a chat product—with early innovations including chat sharing—that grew to 3 million users.

Layer 05 · Predictive terrain

fion

Head of MLJul 2020 — Mar 2021
Seeing fire before it moves

Developed state-of-the-art wildfire spread prediction models using ViT U-Nets for California and Colorado state wildfire services.

Layer 06 · Foundation

owner.com

CofounderJan 2020 — Jun 2020
Origin point

The earliest layer: building a company from zero and establishing the product instincts underneath every system that followed.