Hey, Emil from the article here.<p>I end-up doing part-time work for Google at the interaction of Art/Culture and ML doing project like this (<a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-klimt-color-enigma/SQWxuZfE5ki3mQ?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-klimt-color-enig...</a>), I saved up enough to build an ML rig (<a href="https://www.emilwallner.com/p/ml-rig" rel="nofollow">https://www.emilwallner.com/p/ml-rig</a>), since I worked 2-3 days a week, I could spend the rest of my time doing research. I spent 1-2 years working on reasoning, trying different adaptive compute mechanisms and RL on code and mathematics (similar to R1/o1), however, I realised it was hard to compete with the established labs, and if I published my work it was hard to monetize it to have enough time to stop doing consulting work and fund my compute needs.<p>Instead, I started researching AI colorization, and launched it as a side-project (<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/xe6avh/i_made_a_new_and_free_ai_colorizer_tool_colorize/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/xe6avh...</a>), I ended up having a few hundred thousand users in a few weeks and realized it had enough legs to bootstrap into a company. So I left my consulting gig at Google to go full-time on the colorization project (Palette: <a href="https://palette.fm/" rel="nofollow">https://palette.fm/</a>).<p>Fast forward to today, Palette is still running with a healthy margin, I’ve outsourced most of the things and I can spend most of my time doing AI research. I’d love to publish and open-source more, but since it becomes too easy to copy, it makes it hard to fund myself and my compute needs.<p>Happy to answer any questions.
Previous discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101066">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101066</a><p>IMO the confident Tweets about how to become a good researcher and hire good researchers look pretty weird next to the lack of any apparent research papers (or even visible research products) five years later.