Merwane Drai (me)

About me:

• I live in Palo Alto, CA. It's close enough to the beautiful city of San Francisco but is quieter both literally and metaphorically. Most people my age think of it as a boring suburb with strip malls and Golden Retrievers, but the reality is different. There is something special about Palo Alto.
• I work on video understanding. It's about building systems that are capable of interpreting video footage the way we would. The recent advances in AI have made it a very interesting field to work on. There are many possibilities if we crack video understanding, but I am hoping that the culmination of my research and experiments will unlock things like end-to-end video editing.
• I change my mind frequently on a lot of things, and I don't think there's any shame in it. Some convictions can be dangerous when adopted dogmatically. For example, I no longer believe that we're close to hitting the ceiling on scaling LLMs. Now I simply think that it will take more scale and a handful of clever tricks to get way better models. I still believe that we'll eventually have to start tapping into new modalities.
• I want to meet more people who share my beliefs on PvE over PvP, a larger pie instead of a bigger slice, abundance, positive sum games. The goal should be to beat nature and rewrite its rules. Reach out at merwanedr[at]gmail[dot]com or on X @merwanedr.
• My most important resolution this year is that you won't hear me sound too pessimistic. I want to spread optimism and abundance. Sophisticated cynicism is for Europeans.