On California

There are three plausible reasons why I came to California.

I.

Ever since I was very little, I romanticised the idea of being a scientist. Like all children, I had the idealistic belief that I could spend my life doing a job that I loved. I would read all these pop-sci books about physicists (with not much actual physics!) and daydream about that type of future for myself. Like all former children, as I grew older I vacillated on this belief; for example, I’d say I’m studying linguistics because I love it and computer science because I need a job, admitting these two things didn’t overlap in my life. But the more I saw people around me, particularly in the staid East Coast institution I attended for undergrad, climbing meaningless status hierarchies (did you hear so-and-so got into that one consulting firm?), I realised this situation did not appeal to me at all in the long term. Sometime in college, I remember telling my dad I don’t want to spent my life as a code monkey.

I remember coming to California on my own for the first time as an adult, in summer 2022. Apple wouldn’t sponsor my internship visit to Apple Park, so I came down to Sunnyvale on my own dime and found myself occupying one-third of an elderly Chinese lady’s illegal AirBnB’s living room, armed only with a list of random people I knew off of Twitter whom I intended to meet. And fortuitously I met many people with esoteric and beloved intellectual obsessions, weird jobs that let them pursue such things, and an immense optimism that is missing anywhere else in the country that I’d been, and soon it was pretty clear to me that I had to move here if I wanted a chance at the kind of life my very young self idolised.

And so I came to California.

II.

It was summer 2022 and I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. I had a few good friends, but they were scattered all around the world, while I lived down the street from my parents’ house. There wasn’t any plan for me in D.C. or outside it. For whatever reason, I’d been grinding out college credits and could graduate in the coming year, but I didn’t want to job search or do a Master’s. I enjoyed the computational linguistics research I had been doing in undergrad (it beat homework by a mile) but I’d heard about scaling laws and chatted with GPT-3 after reading Gwern’s blogpost, and this was not going to be the same field for very long. This small startup called Anthropic had released this interesting series of book-length blogposts on trying to understand what was happening inside a language model; I tried (quite poorly) presenting it at a reading group at Georgetown. Well, maybe I can apply for PhDs now and just see what happens; it’s not like I have a better plan. I wrote an impressive paragraph in my statements about my strong publication record in semantic and syntactic parsing, and politely latched on a few sentences about how what I really wanted to work on was interpretability.

Once my sole offer came I did get an offer from Edinburgh too, but I’m a committed American. it was pretty clear that even if I had had a plan before, it wouldn’t have been as good as this. Though I had just started making the best friends I would have in college and I realised that I would in fact miss the place, it was time to leave.

And so I came to California.

III.

The water is so blue.

And so I came to California.