Hey there,
I’m Santiago. I grew up as an actor in Mexico and took part in over 20 shows and movies, but life has since taken me in a very different path.
I went to Stanford University for an undergrad and a master’s degree in Computer Science, graduating a year early.
I like training and using language models (large ones), coding (or directing ChatGPT), playing silly online games (worldle has got me these days), making coffee and playing in soccer (injuries permitting).
What I’m up to now
- I live in San Francisco and work at OpenAI on making our frontier models safer and more robust. Life is busy but the future is bright.
About me
- Built two companies before college: a Khan Academy meets Netflix for the Mexican education system, and a platform for automatic document extraction (think Rossum AI).
- 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.
- Occasionally, I invested in founders at preseed through Dorm Room Fund.
Cool stuff
(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.
Find me on Twitter X, Linkedin (if you even use it?), email or IMDB—where you can take a glimpse into my previous life as an actor.