Hey, Emil from the article here.
I end-up doing part-time work for Google at the interaction of Art/Culture and ML doing project like this (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-klimt-color-enig...), I saved up enough to build an ML rig (https://www.emilwallner.com/p/ml-rig), since I worked 2-3 days a week, I could spend the rest of my time doing research. I spent 1-2 years working on reasoning, trying different adaptive compute mechanisms and RL on code and mathematics (similar to R1/o1), however, I realised it was hard to compete with the established labs, and if I published my work it was hard to monetize it to have enough time to stop doing consulting work and fund my compute needs.
Instead, I started researching AI colorization, and launched it as a side-project (https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/xe6avh...), I ended up having a few hundred thousand users in a few weeks and realized it had enough legs to bootstrap into a company. So I left my consulting gig at Google to go full-time on the colorization project (Palette: https://palette.fm/).
Fast forward to today, Palette is still running with a healthy margin, I’ve outsourced most of the things and I can spend most of my time doing AI research. I’d love to publish and open-source more, but since it becomes too easy to copy, it makes it hard to fund myself and my compute needs.
Happy to answer any questions.
I end-up doing part-time work for Google at the interaction of Art/Culture and ML doing project like this (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-klimt-color-enig...), I saved up enough to build an ML rig (https://www.emilwallner.com/p/ml-rig), since I worked 2-3 days a week, I could spend the rest of my time doing research. I spent 1-2 years working on reasoning, trying different adaptive compute mechanisms and RL on code and mathematics (similar to R1/o1), however, I realised it was hard to compete with the established labs, and if I published my work it was hard to monetize it to have enough time to stop doing consulting work and fund my compute needs.
Instead, I started researching AI colorization, and launched it as a side-project (https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/xe6avh...), I ended up having a few hundred thousand users in a few weeks and realized it had enough legs to bootstrap into a company. So I left my consulting gig at Google to go full-time on the colorization project (Palette: https://palette.fm/).
Fast forward to today, Palette is still running with a healthy margin, I’ve outsourced most of the things and I can spend most of my time doing AI research. I’d love to publish and open-source more, but since it becomes too easy to copy, it makes it hard to fund myself and my compute needs.
Happy to answer any questions.