Honestly, I'm a nobody, no pedigree, probably not whom labs like DeepMind, Meta would go after. I always dreamt of joining DeepMind, Waymo or Nvidia but never qualified as home student for Phd funding, stopped at MSc.
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. 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.
I want Cactus to hit $1m MRR this year, but I might legit be a crazy person...pending official diagnosis.
- 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, 30y, 185m, 83kg, Capricorn & speak Igbo fluently
- Hobbies: calisthenics, UFC, chess, music, dance
- Music: Tyler The Creator, RAYE, Mk,Gee, Jacob Collier, Dominic Fike
- Philosophy: Humanist Christian, unpolitical