Sam Zhai

About

I have always been fascinated by systems that learn and improve themselves. After I quickly found that such systems cannot be understood from a single perspective, I began my interdisciplinary Bohemian journey. At school, I completed degrees in microbiology and music, followed by a joint JD/MBA. My career has been equally varied, spanning work as a church music director, a technical sales specialist at a computer vision company, a big law lawyer, and a judicial law clerk. As I was exploring the many fascinating disciplines, the rise of AI brought me back to an interest that began in Grade 11, when I first read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. The book sparked my fascination with cognitive science, computation, information theory, and self-referential systems. Although the allure of jazz and curing cancer were too great such that I set that interest aside since undergrad, it never disappeared. Fast forward to today, AI has now made it possible for someone like me, who is technical enough to understand code but not trained as a software engineer, to learn by building. For the first time, I can experiment with the kinds of adaptive systems that originally captured my imagination. That realization has drawn me toward AI startups and, more specifically, the intersection of AI and law. It is also what led me to the LegalQuants community, where I hope to learn from others while continuing to follow my own curiosity that brought me here.

1 Project