Louis and I first crossed paths in 2011 while working at a startup in Montreal. Boasting backgrounds in computer graphics, our connection was almost immediate. Conversations ranged from the nitty-gritty of tech to broader, existential topics that questioned the very fabric of our reality.
In 2013, life pulled us in different directions. I relocated to San Francisco while Louis made Singapore his new home. On touching down in SF, I was met with an avalanche of new tech jargon: cloud computing, node.js, server-less, horizontal scalability, and more. It was exhilarating and daunting in equal measure.
As I ventured deeper into this world at Autodesk, projects like Tinkercad provided an immersive dive into cloud computing. Fast forward a couple of years, and my thirst for innovation led me to Adobe, where I played a role in birthing Adobe Express and its next-gen AI capabilities. Here, I expanded my tech repertoire with machine learning tools like PyTorch and Jupyter notebooks. fast.ai and Jeremy Howard’s tutorials were revelations in their own right.
Then came a wave of AI breakthroughs: the release of DALLE-2, Midjourney, stable diffusion, and the paradigm-shifting ChatGPT. Generative AI wasn’t just knocking on the door; it was inside the house. It redefined the way we worked and thought. Yet, amidst this renaissance, two distinct camps emerged: the skeptics and the dismissive.
In this tech whirlwind, I began to miss the raw magic of software development. The days of six-month projects handed off with trust and freedom seemed like distant memories. The new world had standups, managers, and a structure that often suffocated creativity. This wasn’t the world I’d fallen in love with.
But where there’s a will, there’s a way. My ambitions were clear: to venture beyond the confines of a corporate framework. A few months ago, I made the pivotal decision to leave Adobe. The goal? To co-create AI Square with Louis. Here’s to the next chapter!