Sam Zhai

About

I've always been drawn to building and optimizing systems that learn from themselves. The pursuit of better understanding such systems kept me from settling into one discipline, which is unsurprising considering how such systems are too grand and complex to be understood from one perspective alone. At school, I've done concurrently a B.Sc. in microbiology and a B.Mus. in piano studies, followed immediately by four years on a JD/MBA joint degree. The same trend of intellectual restlessness continued in the realm of my professional career. I have worked as a music director and organist at a church, as a technical sales specialist at a computer vision company, a lawyer in big law, and a judicial law clerk at a trial court. Sadly, none of the above made me feel like I've found my calling. As someone who is technical enough to understand code (slowly), but not technical enough to do what I want to do with code at scale, I never had the chance or ambition to design such systems myself and play with them. The boom of AI changed that. It brought me back to where the agitation underlying my life started. The culprit is Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, GEB for short. When I first read it in grade 11, the book made me fall in love with cognitive science, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and computer science. But because my passion for curing cancer was too great at that time, I quietly shelved the ambition to understand brains through computation and let immunology, bioinformatics, law, music, and everything else take its place. Coming back to the present day, the AI boom allowed a ninth-rate programmer like myself to learn by doing, and to finally build the kind of self-improving systems GEB first got me chasing. So AI technology it is, and what better place to engage with this powerful new entity than at an AI startup? Yet, with law having played such a large role in my life, I could not simply give up on it either. And thus, I've decided to join and learn from everyone in the LegalQuants community, the same restless curiosity that got me here still very much intact.

1 Project