About
Hi, I'm Afik! (/ɑˈfiːk/; rhymes with "seek")
- Most recently co-founder & CTO Fairbrook AI
- Co-founded Codeflash
- Worked at Morph Labs
- Early technical staff at Perplexity
Currently open to research engineering roles in SF (in-person/hybrid) - let's work together
Problems I'm currently interested in
- Reinforcement learning, particularly the big world hypothesis
- Code AGI will be the first AGI we achieve, capturing 80% of the value of AGI
- Voice agents having conversations is nontrivial mainly because turn-detection is non-trivial
- In this decade, computers will be better than humans at finding proofs of mathematical theorems
Non-obvious discoveries that have made a profound difference in my life
- The Jaw Epidemic is at the root of many of chronic "diseases of civilization"
- Luck is created
- Sleep is a skill
- You are the average of the top 5 people you spend the most time with
- Lying and withholding is the major source of all human stress and suffering
- All problems are interpersonal relationship problems
Art & Music
Outside of computers (or rather, in concert with them), I am also a dj, music producer & artist, and have worked on several large interactive art installations with tens of thousands of LEDs. I've taken many of these to Burning Man, where I'm one of the leads of the BAAAHS art car and volunteer as a Black Rock Ranger.
Projects I'm proud of
Wave
At Fairbrook AI I'm building Wave, a social voice app that merges live chat, text and recorded voice so you never have to schedule calls. Chatlines are always on and friends can drop in whenever.
Codeflash
I co‑founded Codeflash to build AI agents that automatically optimize Python code, search for the fastest implementation via benchmarking and deliver performance gains while verifying correctness.
Event Horizon
Our crew built a three‑story‑tall, audio‑reactive LED kinetic sculpture with five concentric rings spinning 30 ft in the air. Covered by over a mile of LEDs, it pulses to music and creates an immersive dance floor.
SheepGPT
I turned our mutant art car into a talking sheep using Llama‑2 70B. An on‑board server generates quirky responses to burners in real time and speaks them through a glowing LED speech bubble.
BAAAHS
A 76,000 LED sheep art car that roams the playa. I've contributed to the shader software (Kotlin Native, C/C++ and GLSL) and rigged the subwoofers + line array speakers on her.
LED Totem
A meter‑long Bluetooth‑controlled totem with 840 addressible LEDs. I built the PCB/electronics, Arduino firmware and onboard Android Things app from scratch, letting people send messages to it wirelessly at festivals and raves.
Writing
I enjoy sharing what I learn about engineering, hardware hacking and AI. Here are a few recent posts from my blog:
- SheepGPT: the art car that talks back — using Llama‑2 70B
- How I built a Bluetooth‑connected LED marquee for EDC
- The Pixel 2 XL: a phone that can't take videos or play audio
Read more on my Medium.
Contact
Interested in collaborating or just want to say hi? Reach out via email at aphex@aphex.cx or using one of the socials below.
