arun rao

i currently play a lot with foundation agents at Meta, trying to perfect them to launch the little fellas at billion scale. previously, i built out the evaluations org for Meta’s Llama autoregressive LLMs in Meta’s Central GenAI Group (a sister team to FAIR, now called Meta Superintelligence). and prior to that, i co-led a large team of product managers and research engineers working on ML recommenders and ranking models at Meta’s Monetization Ranking AI group that served ~4 billion people. i’m also a university lecturer at UCLA, teaching a class on advanced product design.

i spend my time thinking about real-world uses of ML, obscure math, internet protocols, APIs, incentive mechanisms, contemporary art, and design.

i write the Substack letter Hash Collision, where i report on developments in AI/ML, science, tech, culture, economics, and ethics. i also have a limited podcast, the Variance Pod, where Jake Kraft and I find and interview up-and-coming, variant people with revolutionary ideas, art, scientific work, books, buildings, products, and other artifacts. i co-wrote “A History of Silicon Valley, 2nd Ed.“

in the past, i led an applications and platform machine learning team at Amazon Music in San Francisco. prior to that, i was a co-founder of Starbutter AI (Skydeck F17) and a quant debt and derivatives trader at PIMCO (working under Bill Gross, Mohamed El-Erian, and Dan Ivascyn). i’m still a licensed attorney in the Wyoming State Bar (the Equality state, where women first got the right to vote, and LLCs and DAOs to exist) and was formerly a CFA charterholder.

i’m a grad of UCLA, Penn/Wharton, the University of Arizona College of Law, and the Indiana Academy.

i like books, running, yoga, math, grammar and style, dead ancient languages, modern computer languages, black hole physics, bears, cacti, and pad see-ew.