Akshay Iyer
Hi, I'm Akshay. Welcome to my website :))
I'm currently building in labour markets with Polymath Society. For the past several months I've been trying to change education, and I've learnt that it's all about how you measure people. Once you measure them the right way and get them outcomes, the free markets will orient around it to change education.
I love reading, it has 10x'ed my judgement and thinking. I experimented with a lot of different habits to read more while building a company, and what works best for me is exclusively audiobooks, your eyes stay free so you can keep operating in the world. Then I habit stack: whenever I'm traveling, at the gym, or preparing food, I have an audiobook on. All of my dead time goes to either speaking to friends and family, or reading.
I also think deeply about things: myself, life, institutions, humanity. Read a few of my thoughts here.
Music is the art form that appeals to me the most, the highest fidelity to human emotion, and I do some myself.
And I'm a chill guy, I absolutely love life. Spend time with me and you'll see I make a lot of jokes and I laugh a lot.
Here are some of my test scores
- IIT-JEE (India's toughest STEM exam) : Top 0.01 percentile (Rank 225/1.3 million)
- Among the national top 1% of test takers in:
- Indian National Physics Olympiad 2019
- Indian National Chemistry Olympiad 2019
- Indian National Astronomy Olympiad 2019 - KVPY fellowship recipient (Indian Government): All India Rank 109
Here are my AI research publications
- AI research paper to mitigate training data biases. AAAI conference paper: Read here
- Akshay Iyer*, Kanad Pardeshi*, Nikunj Goyal*, Pranamya Kulkarni*, Abhilasha Sancheti et al., "A method to generate image descriptions with varying levels of detail", filed patent (USPTO), Adobe reference: P11617-US.
Education & Experience
Founder
I've been a founder on and off since January 2025: launched 7 different products, and learnt loads with every iteration. I've been a member at South Park Commons and Founders Inc along the way.
I'm now building Polymath out of Mox, the community for rationalists and effective altruists in San Francisco.
Plato
I was building RL environments for computer use agents. I solo-built an agentic coding harness that looks at any website and clones its frontend, backend and synthetic data into an environment, and we got an OpenAI contract off the back of it. Plato sold to AWS and OpenAI.
Adobe Research
I built the first controllable image captioning algorithm that takes a continuous value as input, so you can dial how much detail a description carries. It became a filed patent in passing.
Columbia University in the City of New York
GPA: 4.0825/4.0
Relevant Coursework: Generative AI for Code, Cloud Computing, Engineering
Software as a Service, Blockchain and Web3.0, Databases, Computation and the brain, Principles of
Innovation, UI Design
Here's some stuff I did :
- Simulating the brain: Built a simulator to analyze the transition dynamics of neuron assemblies in spiking networks.
- Zerocurve AI: Built a tool that helps people learn to use complicated-UI software like the Epic EHR software.
- Inntwine: Built a networking and idea sharing platform for Columbia students.
- Freelancing on Ethereum: Built a first-come-first-serve freelancing platform with automatic job verification and payment.
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
GPA: 9.21/10.0
Relevant Coursework: Technology Venture Creation, Data Structures and Algorithms,
Analysis of Algorithms, Programming for Data Science, Introduction to ML, Advanced ML, Intelligent Agents
and RL, Deep Learning for NLP, Optimization in ML, Digital Image Processing
Here's some stuff I did :
- Teaching machines to hear like the human brain: Built speech recognition with Liquid State Machines, and explored training rules beyond backpropagation to improve them.
- Counterfactual estimation: Researched better AI architectures for continuous treatment datasets. Published at AAAI-24.
- Data partnerships in Indian banks: Worked on a B2B to greatly simplify bank digital partnerships (customer data exchange with third parties).
Elsewhere
The full list of things I've shipped is on the projects page. The ideas I keep coming back to are on the thoughts page. For everything else, I'm on X, GitHub and LinkedIn.
And please do reach out at [email protected]. I love meeting people, and I read and reply to everything. Tell me what you're building, or what you think I've got wrong.