Professional news: I've joined Hugging Face 🤗 as product designer.
This post elaborates a bit on the backstory and reasons for why i have joined Hugging Face.
My journey into the intersection of machine learning, generative systems, open-source, HCI and design started about 10y ago. Coming from the worlds of design, game development and procedural generation - in 2013/14 i found a new home in a small community of researchers, developers and artists that were excited about the crude ML systems of the time. In those years, i realized countless public ML experiments and projects for corporate clients - allowing me to develop intuition for what it means to design products for humans in the age of AI.
Around 2015, two phenomena had captured my imagination: Open source and open knowledge were transforming how science and ML were done. To promote this trend, i launched Gitxiv in 2015 - a site for "collaborative open computer science" which combined open code, open research and community. It was quiet popular for a while. At the same time, machine learning began to transform creativity. Explorations of this trend led me to co-found the startup "Creative.AI" in 2016 and raising €2m+ to execute on a thesis that (generative) ML will democratize creative industries. The startup was premature, but the thesis and concerns from then are still valid.
After many other projects, I joined @GoogleAI in 2018 as part of a team that was strategically situated between fundamental A.I research and product development. I had the opportunity to help design ML-driven products across many of Google's key verticals and got to intimately collaborate with some of the leading people in the ML industry - from science, engineering, design and management. The scale of ambition and operations at Google was truly dizzying. My work on projects such as ██████ and ██████ significantly contributed to ████████ and ████████. After 4 years, i left Google in early 2022.
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Which brings me to the present day: I'm exciting to announce that I've joined @huggingface 🤗 as product designer. Hugging Face - "the AI community building the future" - is a startup I've followed with great interest for the past few years. It's bold mission of "democratizing good machine learning" by "empowering the community through open and collaborative technology building at the intersection of science and engineering" deeply resonates with me. So does the decentralized and nimble approach which is at the heart of this community. Over the years, Hugging Face has evolved into the leading open ecosystem for all one's needs to build machine learning solution and has become a catalyst for open ML science.
In a world where most companies will soon be AI companies, the value of a truly open and community driven innovation ecosystem can not be overstated. I believe that the real "foundation models" of our time will be built together by everyone for everyone, in-order to authentically contribute to the prosperity of all. On this path we face many difficult questions, such as "what does it mean to design products for humans in the age of AI"? I am excited to find answers together with my new colleges and the community at Hugging Face!
Feel free to reach me at any time at samim AT huggingface.co 🤗