• Building HumanPlane
• Projects Sculpt
• Previously sold 2 project-scoped startups, RealmPlay (Character AI but with Llama running on consumer grade GPUs) and SoulBazaar (Autonomous social agents for web3)
• ex-Senior Software Engineer @ Instacart
• Previously interned at Coinbase, SeatGeek, PagerDuty and 2 other companies.
• CS at University of Waterloo

Details: https://linkedin.com/in/nikshepsvn

My goal is singular: build interesting technology that progresses humanity, compound my knowledge and wealth by playing increasingly larger and higher-stake games over time.

I have been closely following the AI/LLM/Diffusion space since it's inception. RealmPlay, my project-turned-company that was acquired, was built on a fine-tuned, block-merged version of Llama, productionized by building an API on top of exllama, a framework meant for fast inference using consumer GPUs. I used vast.ai, renting multiple 3090's to serve production traffic, using a Digital Ocean Droplet and nginx as a multi-region load balancer -- this was well before projects like vLLM and other serving frameworks existed. I scaled the context from 4K to 16K with SuperHOT the day kaiokendev had the breakthrough of discovering RoPE scaling, which is now commonly used to extend context.

I am also deeply familiar and comfortable with crypto, I've been a part of multiple "metas", starting from 2017, all the way to current day. While I might not have as much deep technical context with crypto as I do with AI, I have a strong intuition and understanding of the space, enough to let me approach and tackle any valid problem.

Recently (Jan 2025), I sold SoulBazaar -- a launchpad for AI social agents on web3. I built the entire platform from scratch in roughly 1W. After development, I realized my vision for the platform would take a whole lot of time (autonomous social agents that evolve from social interaction, using the internet and engagement as a giant RL playground to build personality, lore, backstory etc.) and sold the platform to a third-party. They web3 enabled the platform and pivoted it into social media marketing agent, the token on launch ($SOULS) reached a $5M+ marketcap.

Some other recent projects I've explored in the space, which gave me significant learnings, include:

• SniffChain - solana token data terminal + launchpad aggregator + X defi agent + risk pipeline & more
  • multi-agent swarms, solana, tokenomics, marketing, content, lots of crypto
• DreamLoom - near real time interactive video platform (with narration, video, audio & more)
  • content production agents, prompt engineering, nextjs, design, AI-native interfaces
• SoulBazaar (v1) - the initial version of SoulBazaar was an LLM fine-tune community and marketplace prototype powered by LoRAX
  • LoRAs, synthetic data generation, fine-tuning, SGMV kernel, tool-calling etc.
• ThumbGen - a YouTube Thumbnail Design Copilot (launched, got 10+ paying customers before ramping it down to focus)
  • Diffusion, DiT architecture, generative UI, ComfyUI, IP-Adapter, structured output, prompting techniques etc.
• Misc hacking (blog writer agent, video understanding via frame-extraction etc.)
  • Agentic behavior, embedding, RAG, multimodality, etc.

I have a long history building & learning things outside my professional work, some notable projects include:

• Crypto Development & Mining (2016): mined ETH at $35/token, dev for token w/ $50M+ peak marketcap
  • crypto fundamentals, PoW/PoS, smart contract development, marketing/branding etc.
• Multiple Hackathons (2017, 2018): won prize for headband solution to prevent car accidents, while building at 10+ events
  • built various products and learnt about different core areas, from PHP, app development to cloud and hardware
• AnimeLootStore (early 2019): dropshipped anime merch, ran ads, did 100+ orders
  • design/positioning/branding, marketing via facebook/google Ads, finances, customer experience etc.
• FuzzPandaFilms (late 2019): YT channel automated w/ reddit content, reached 10M views, 16K subscribers
  • data parsing + processing, programatic video generation, youtube optimization etc.
• Automated Instagram Pages (2020): bot to scrape for viral content and repost on instagram, reaching 5000+ followers
  • web scraping, data processing / management, APIs etc.
• Much much more -- bunch of OSS libraries, working on decentralized casinos, and a ton of experimentation

While my professional background is largely with Data / Infrastructure / Fullstack engineering, my personal experiences and interests in the AI realm, via building products and following forums like /r/LocalLLama, /r/StableDiffusion and X have led to me building an extremely strong and broad foundation in applied AI engineering -- with a solid understanding of model architectures & fundamentals (ssm + transformers + diffusion etc.), fine-tuning (full/LoRA/qLoRA), syntethic data generation pipelines, vector databases / RAG, prompt engineering, agentic behavior/frameworks, structured output, generative UI, evals and other subject matter.

I stay up to date with the bleeding-edge developments in the space and would love to chat about related topics -- feel free to reach out for a chat at either [email protected] or [email protected]