New year, new job
When 2024 started, I was working hard with my team on a new product launch for Fortanix. Their leadership switched focus to AI after that launch, and that product hasn’t been announced.
I joined Second Front Systems in August, taking an observability focused role at a company that works to help startups gain approval to sell in military and government contexts; with a strong emphasis on security. I studied for and passed my CompTIA Security+ exam; and for a while I was an admin on an official government network. I also helped build out a scrubbing service and pipeline for removing sensitive data from alerts in high security systems so they could be monitored from insecure systems, like slack or email.
Around November, I was contacted by the head of AI at Valence; Jeff Dalton, who was a senior graduate student when I started my PhD at UMass Amherst. Long story short, the folks at Valence convinced me to move jobs again, and I find myself working on classification, evaluation, and LLMs, now branded as Generative AI, but the technology is pretty much the same as it was when transformers and attention came onto the research scene seven years ago.
In a time of economic and political uncertainty, I’m lucky to have some job options and a founding-role in a startup that seems to have a strong, valid business use-case for large-language models.