Hey there,
I’m Santiago. I am a researcher at OpenAI in the Reasoning team, where I focus on teaching models to code, do deep browsing, and utlimately perform autonomous research (which I see as the ultimate flywheel to unlock AGI).
I went to Stanford University for an undergrad and a master’s degree in Computer Science, graduating early. Much before that, I grew up as an actor in Mexico and took part in over 20 shows and movies. That is, I’m a retired telenovela actor.
I like training and using language models (large ones), coding (or rather, prompting ChatGPT), playing silly online games (worldle has got me these days), making coffee and playing in soccer (injuries permitting).
Other stuff
- Built two companies before college: a Khan Academy meets Netflix for the Mexican education system, and a platform for automatic document extraction where we had large enterprise customers in Mexico as customers.
- I’m an ocassional angel investor.
- Did research at Hazy Research on Retrieval-Augmented Language Models during my coterm at Stanford.
- Worked on a mix of software engineering and product at Stripe, Cresta and Pioneer.
Stuff I find cool
(not a lot just yet)
- If you’re into LLMs, you should check out CS 336: Language Modeling from Scratch. It’s an open-source class at Stanford and probably the best content out there around building your own language model from scratch (as in, from tokenizer to pre-training, to distributed systems, to scaling laws to finetuning and beyond). Best class I took at Stanford and it was during my very last quarter.
- Mexico City as a highly rated city yet still underrated. Email me if you need recs but you’d find it hard not to find excellent places for food, culture and history.
- Flair Espresso. The best espresso you can make, if you’re extremely patient about it. The built of the machine is fantastic and, if your curiosity takes you there, you’ll enjoy perfecting every detail of your next cup.
Find me on X, Linkedin (if that’s still a thing), email or IMDB—where you can take a glimpse into my previous life as an actor.