Honestly, I'm a nobody, no pedigree, probably not whom labs like OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic would go after. I always dreamt of joining DeepMind, Waymo or Nvidia but never qualified as home student for PhD funding, stopped at MSc. Also, my research has always been proprietary, hard to prove how much I know.
Nonetheless, I could train a 1B-A200m model on an iPhone 17 Pro at ~650 tokens/sec. It will take 360 days on 20B tokens of training data and use 156KW of electricity which cost $51. The phone will fry of course, so I wrote algorithms to run inference on your phone rather. We named it after a plant that survives in resource-constrained environments, the Cactus.
We raised some money from YCombinator, Oxford's Seed Fund, FCVC (portfolio include Slack, Coinbase, GitLab, Instacart etc.), and 6 smaller funds like Transpose (run by Garry Tan's brother), fellow YC founders, as well as 62 tech CTOs/VP/Directors both via syndicate and directly at Google DeepMind etc.
Cactus now powers cool products you've probably heard of...I think. 6 exceptionally gifted "Cactus Jacks" from UCLA, Nokia, Google, Stanford, Oxford have joined us! The project is also co-maintained by groups at UCLA, Yale, Upenn, Imperial, Georgia, NUS, UCI, CU Boulder and UCI.
Same destination, just a different route!
- 2025-XX: Cactus (YC S25) - Founder & CTO (tiny inference engine for phones and wearables).
- 2024-25: Deep Render - AI Research Engineer (realtime video models that run on phone GPU/NPU).
- 2021-24: Wisdm - ML Software Engineer (distributed perception AI for Maxar Defence satelite views).
- 2019-21: MSc + Open-source activities (JAX/NanoDl, Torch/SuperLazyAutograd, CUDARepo, etc.).
- 2018-19: Google GADS Scholarship Programme with Andela (pre-MSc), around systems design.
- 2017-18: National Youth service, posted to software engineering after bootcamp, mostly ARM.
- 2012-16: Started uni at 15y, covered EECS, data structures, algorithms, maths, physics.
- Wrote Maths, CS & AI Compendium, a veeery unconventional textbook.
- Kevin Murphy (DeepMind Principal), Thomas Wolf (HuggingFace Co-foubder), Daniel Holtz (Mid Journey Founder), Steve Messina (IBM CTO) followed back on X.
- After CUDARepo, Nvidia reached out, I did 7 technical rounds, got a verbal offer, back-and-forth over YOE/pay, then I got YC.
- Did MSc at QMUL, just to work with Prof Matt Purver (Ex-Stanford Researcher on CALO), did my project/thesis with his team.
- Did BEng under Prof Onyema Uzoamaka (Rumoured first Nigerian CS grad from MIT), he taught computing archs off-head!
- Profile: Nigerian/British, 30y, 185m, 83kg, Capricorn
- Language: English, Igbo, German (barely), French (yikes)
- Hobbies: calisthenics, UFC, chess, music, dance
- Music: Tyler The Creator, RAYE, Mk,Gee, Jacob Collier, Dominic Fike
- Philosophy: Humanist Christian, unpolitical (your peace over my opinions)
My biggest career miss was a PhD Studentship at Meta FAIR, recruiter went to vacation after onsite for weeks. Many of the scientists keep reviewing my Linkedin profile for days, another candidate was selected. The lack of closure hurt, but its safer to assume the other candidate was better, before I resent an innocent recruiter.