About

Hi! I'm Nathan, and my full Chinese name is Guangyu Chen. I'm a high school student from China.

Specific topics I like and am learning about:

Efficient Attention (e.g. sparse/linear) and LLMs in general
User psychology - Most recent project was a YouTube account that made 190k subscribers in 4 days
Design and aesthetics
Human mind and consciousness
The ultimate nature of reality (a mathematical universe, perhaps?)
AI Alignment
Effective Communication in an Open-Source Community
Tutoring

On a high level, I basically like to:

Learn about everything - iterating through an infinitely large graph.
Chat with LLMs - the process of figuring out the system prompt applies everywhere.
Play with my cats.

Right now, I am trying to discover more interesting things out there and spend time learning and reflecting on them. One of the things that still captivates me the most is artificial intelligence. Reading about the latest progress and experimenting with some small models are things I enjoy doing. The long term goal here is to build agentic and safe LLMs.

Another thing I love is open-source, which has given me the opportunity to learn programming. I have also been building an open-source community for teenagers over the past two years. One question I ponder often is whether open-sourcing future Large Language Models will drive progress in an aligned fashion.

Competitive programming is the last part I'll bring up. It was my first stop for coding and helped me build a mathematical and logical sense of abstract reasoning. I very often just stare at an algorithm, sitting for an hour straight. What pulls me toward this field is the competitive programming community Codeforces which has the best vibe ever.

Here are some links to more detailed aspects of me:

Projects I've done
Questions I have (both reflective and technical)

Other stuff

I am extremely grateful for the things in my life, and I'm currently passing it on through tutoring students on useful things (e.g. using AI).

I enjoy reading books, mostly biographies and non-fiction, playing all kinds of sports and video games, and meditating. My top three sports are snowboarding, scuba diving, and playing basketball.

Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I like to look around and appreciate the beautiful aspects of my surroundings (I know this sounds like a distraction from my true emotions, but it works really well).

Communities I'm part of: Fabric (PAIR), Rise, Schoolhouse

Fun fact about me: my right eye is nearsighted, but my left eye is farsighted. Tiny fact: this is called antimetropia!

Other stuff

Other links