Professional Overview

• 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

About Me

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.

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

• Tremor - Realtime Prediction Market Monitor (https://github.com/sculptdotfun/tremor)
• VibeRank - Claude code leaderboard (viberank.app)
• SoulBazaar (v2) - launchpad for social media agents for tokens to build community
• 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]