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Last updated Dec, 2024.
This website is an entropy defying organisation of my mind which needs to be updated regularly before entropy wins. Until that happens, here’s the index:
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I grew up in Bengaluru, the startup capital of India. Childhood evenings were a mix of cricket and coming home to build stuff. Some days it was Lego scorpions (not from any manual), other days it was origami. One summer, we had this idea: sell origami door-to-door. I did what you might call a pitch. We made about Rs.346 but didn't know what to do with it, so we gave it to our school's charity fund.
Then Minecraft came in and we all wanted to make a game like it. We didn't know coding, so our first game was on Hopscotch. Around 7th grade, I emailed Airtel (India's largest mobile company) with an app idea. They didn't reply, so I thought, why not make one myself?
That's when things got interesting. I stumbled upon Andrew Ng's lectures and got hooked on ML. I found myself learning about differentiation in 9th grade, trying to understand backpropagation. It was challenging, but I was so fascinated by it all. I started experimenting with training my own models, including a mask detector during COVID. It was like a whole new world opened up.
Since then, it's been a wild ride of learning and building. I've messed around with all sorts of architectures - CNN's, RNN's, attention systems, and lately, I've been doing independent AI research. Every new thing I learn, I try to build something with it. It's like my brain won't let me rest until I've made something, anything.
I've published a game on the Play Store, created an AI pendant for the visually impaired, made a website that did my homework, and a bunch of other projects. Some worked out, some didn't, but they’ve all brought me closer to realising intelligence.
That's pretty much me. An endlessly curious kid trying to make sense of this world and trying to contribute to building AGI, always learning, and always building.
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yaR
We were deciding between 2 project ideas for a hackathon: an AI pendant for the visually impaired or cheating devices for chess. In a moment of rare wisdom, we chose the former and created an AI pendant (initially a cardboard box with wires coming out and a boom mic for the microphone). We tested the device with real users at the Singapore Association of Visually Handicapped and kept iterating until we built yaR: a working device that recognises objects, reads text, and describes scenes, providing visually impaired individuals with real-time environmental awareness.
yaR | AI Pendent for Visually Impaired
Here’s the full story:
Manas is coming to SF (Jan'25 - Dec'25) - hire me! on Twitter / X
GPT Book Club
I was reading The Code Breaker and wondered how cool it would be to ask questions to Jennifer Doudna about the ideas in her book. And so we built one of the first ChatGPT wrappers using RAG that enabled users to ask questions to books. We had over 10K users visit the site and got Varun Mayya (700K followers) and Tanmay Bhat (1.9M followers) share the website reel which got 135K views.
GPT Book Club: Interactive AI-Powered Book Summaries
SEEKH During COVID, India had multiple phases of lockdown and schools were predominantly online. However, some economically weaker schools didn’t have infrastructure to support online classes. So I built an app that connects needy students with volunteer teachers for free tuition.
Student Led Organisation | Seekh | Bengaluru
While the app worked, there were initially no users! So I formed a team with my classmates and after running the organisation for about 6 months, we had over 300 students and teachers in the community.
Handwriter My school’s homework system was peculiar. Teachers would make us write, word for word, the class notes (pdf files) into our notebooks. This was super boring and so I created a program that converted typed text into handwriting. Together with 2 friends, we created a website that let anyone convert typed text into their handwriting.
Handwriter - Convert Text to Handwriting and Calligraphy
We got over 5K users across various schools in the region :)
Weev
While we were working on yaR, my friends and I were really intrigued by the idea of an AI friend and so we decided to build one ourselves. It was exhilarating working on 2 AI pendant projects at the same time and we eventually had a really fun prototype (which we applied to YC with).
We were really serious about the project and so over summer’24, we spoke to a lot of people across industries to figure out who our target market would be. But after hundreds of customer interviews, we realised no one really wanted the device and so we focussed on what was working, yaR.
Here’s the full story:
Manas is coming to SF (Jan'25 - Dec'25) - hire me! on Twitter / X
Kissan Dial
Hackathon project where my friends Samarth, Dev and I built an AI agent for farmers in India to help them find subsidies and government schemes that would help them.
Kissan Dial: Voice2voice phone agent for farmers to get information on government subsidies in India
We got featured by LlamaIndex and Samarth wrote a blog on how to set it up.
AI Voice Agent for Indian Farmers: Bridging the Information Gap
Gita Daily
I had gotten into reading about ancient Indian philosophy texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and thought it would be a cool idea to create a WhatsApp service which would send users 1 Shloka from the Gita everyday — daily Gita messages instead of Good morning ones. My friend Samarth and I built the WhatsApp bot and maintained it for over a year and scaled it to over 1k DAUs before the free WhatsApp nodeJS package became super buggy and we didn’t pivot to paid ones since we didn’t want to charge users.
Gita-Daily -Your Personal Bhagavad Gita
Voyz I was heading to class one day, listening to music, when it hit me: why listen to music, when I could listen to Paul Graham’s essays. And so a week later, Sparsh and I created a website where you could listen to Paul Graham and Sam Altman’s essays.
When I tweeted that my friend listens to them before sleeping, here’s what Paul said:
Memorph I was pretty inspired by the Neumorphism UI technique and was thinking about it when I played Google’s calculator game on Pi day. Over a weekend I thought about merging the two to create a fun memory game — memory neumorphism, or memorph for short.
MeMorph: Easy to Play, Impossible to Master
DripCheck
When multimodal LLM’s were becoming a thing, Sparsh and I wanted to build something with it. The first idea that came to mind? An AI that would roast your sense of fashion lol.
So we hooked up a GPU and ran an instance of LLaVA and created DripCheck
Promo Video (cause why not!)
Mask Detector
During COVID, people in my apartment would wear their masks without covering their nose and I thought it would be cool to track people not wearing masks in a video frame via CCTV cameras. So I trained a mask detector using the YOLO-v4 architecture and tried to integrate it into my apartment’s CCTV stream.
Clash Royale Bot
My friends and I played insane amounts of Clash Royale in 8th grade. Luckily, this was also the time when I got into coding and so I wrote a script to automate playing games (which made my friends think I was always online during exam time)
Built a Clash Royale Bot in 8th Grade
JournalGPT Weekend project where I tried to make journalling the free-flowing stream of consciousness it was meant to be. And then preserved those thoughts in a meaningful manner that’s easily accessible.
JournalGPT: The Ideal Journalling Experience
NotionTube
Weekend project where I tried to convert YouTube videos into insightful and comprehensive summaries that could be viewed on your Notion page.
NotionTube: One-Click YouTube-to-Notion Summaries
DreamReel
Weekend project where I used Adobe Firefly, ElevenLabs and GPT-4 to generate dream like reels based on a short description.
DreamReel: Make your Dreams Come Alive with a Single Prompt
PhoneCallGPT Weekend project where I put ChatGPT on my phone dial.
Phone Call GPT: ChatGPT, but via Calls
RickRoller Weekend project where I put up a poll on my Instagram asking people if they would find it cool to rick roll their friends through a phone call. Since the majority said yes and I was bored, I built it. In 2 days I had burned through my free tier balance on Twilio and had 91 hours of usage.
Rick Roll your Friends through a Phone Call
Obviously, I didn’t think this through fully because the rick roll phone calls were placed through my number and I had annoyed people calling me all through the day lol.
ValentineGPT ChatGPT had launched a few months ago and their API wasn’t announced yet but there was a way to unofficially route requests to it. So Yajat and I built a website around Valentine’s day that let people ask questions to a “Love Oracle” and generate poems for their loved ones. The website generated over 500K words of content and we got Ganesh Balakrishnan to post about it on Instagram
https://valentinegpt.netlify.app/
Just The Video I often go to YouTube with the intent to find a particular video but would end up watching a couple of other videos from the homepage recommendations so over a weekend I created a website which just had a search bar that let you access YouTube videos without the distraction — just the video. The website is no longer live and I switched over to a chrome extension instead.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230722145019/https://justthevideo.org/
WhatsAWordle
The word game Wordle was gaining popularity and I saw my friends share their results on WhatsApp day after day. I thought it would be a cool idea to build Wordle right into WhatsApp and so WhatsAWordle was born. In just 2 days I got over 300 users and then ran out of Twilio cloud credits :_)
WhatsAWordel: Play Wordle on WhatsApp
Matricks It was the summer of Grade 7 and I wanted to build an app. After learning how to program in Java, I published an app to the Play Store at the end of summer and officially got into building.
Matricks - Apps on Google Play
Cube Attack My first foray into building games back in 8th Grade — super, super fun :)
Handwriting Recognition iOS App
After learning about CNN’s in 9th Grade, I created a simple app that used a model trained on the MNIST dataset.
Handwriting Recognition App using Machine Learning
Drone Detection
When I first learned about the YOLO-v3 model, I had a broken drone at home. I was fascinated by the concept of object detection and decided to use this opportunity to train a custom model to detect drones.
Apps for the Aasha Infinite Foundation
During COVID, I created apps for the teacher community of the Aasha Foundation to better track student progress and improve management efficiency.
Aasha Foundation - Apps on Google Play
Aasha Admin - Apps on Google Play
Memories for the Batch of ‘21
My school asked me to create an app for the graduating batch of 2021 and so I made it over a weekend.
Bethany Batch 2021 - Apps on Google Play
BargAIn
Weekend project where I created a bargaining agent for e-commerce websites. The idea here is to enable people to bargain for products at scale in an online setting. Sellers can decide a strict lower bound for their products so they never go into a loss.
bargAIn: want lower prices on clothes? bargain for them!
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