The View from the Office.

I met up with Kaelan Yim, a rising junior studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Bryant Park Cafe. He had quesadillas; I had the sliders. 

Kaelan grew up in the Bay Area. While neither of his parents worked in tech, he became interested in computer programming because of a passion for video games. He estimates he played about five hours of Minecraft a day in high school.

He arrived at Berkeley planning after graduation to work on computer chip manufacturing. But friends steered his interest in the direction of AI safety research.

He got a chance to work on benchmarks and evals for frontier models as a Cambridge MARS scholar and this summer he is visiting Washington for a policy program run by the Hertog Foundation with the Institute for the Study of War. 

One of the fun things about connecting with someone so much younger is the perspective they provide. Our conversation ranged from the percentage of Berkley students using AI to cheat on tests (high) to the red-pilled San Francisco AI culture. 

We covered a lot of ground, including his sense of the difference between fellowships like Z Fellows and those arranged by Thiel and 776 Foundation as well as the evolution of Y Combinator and of course, the recent debate over closed and open-sourced AI model builders. 

On the side, Kaelan does robotics research. He managed to procure a lidar sensor similar to the kind Waymo mounts on its vehicles and he’s using it to train robots recorded from a third-person perspective. 

He said the best thing about attending Berkeley isn’t the classes so much as the community. In education, the fundamentals still matter because you need to know the basics to understand the tech. 

Kaelan is a proponent of open weight models and he expects the enormous price differentials between US models from companies like Anthropic and the Chinese models like Kimi K3.

He has a wide range of hobbies beyond AI including spelunking, leatherworking, glassblowing, crochet, gardening, autocross, cinema and axe throwing.

He told me there are four things he wants to see during his lifespan: humans living beyond Earth, autonomous robots, fusion power, and research into human cognition. 

You can connect with Kaelan via LinkedIn or X or DM me for a warm intro.