This summer, our team grew with three students joining us as interns. Along with our CTO, Joe Engalan, they researched Artificial Intelligence (AI) and made strides in improving our AI model that is used to implement alternative text in our interactives, supported by our recent NSF grant. We interviewed them to learn more about their experience at Alchemie this summer:
What surprised you the most about working at a startup?
Aidan: “I would say the biggest surprise was how much responsibility that you're given right off the bat. So, from what I've heard about other companies, especially bigger ones, you'll work on a feature or some of their software for months and it won't get used. Whereas as at a startup, everything that you do has value, everything you do is important and it's useful.”
Cameron: “To add to what Aidan said, just like how small your team is, you know what I mean? Like, you have a lot more responsibility because your team is smaller [...] You have to do something, you have to contribute to the team. Which is, I think that's really cool for an internship.”
Rhea: “Yeah, along the same lines. I think this is kind of nice but you're thrown into it a little bit. You're just going into it head first [...] But I think it was honestly a really good experience to do that.”
What was the most interesting thing you learned this summer?
Aidan: “So as far as the transformer model goes, a lot of the math was quite fascinating. Not to nerd out a little bit, but like the attention mechanisms that were fascinating to learn about [...] But I would also say just every day we were learning something new and improving on what we did. Even on our second-to-last day of our internship, we're still learning.”
Cameron: “Yeah. I would say for sure just learning all the different steps of how these things happen in the background, like chat GPT, and finding out how it's literally all computation and all probability. It's just so fascinating. The future of the world is probably AI, and a lot of it is just like probability and math.”
Rhea: “For me, it’s kind of the same thing. So like working on the transformer model and just being able to learn about where it started from [...] I think that was really cool because like Chat GPT is seen as something that's so new. But the fact is like all of this technology has been around forever. It's just that now is when it was brought into prevalence. So just being able to see everything and how the technology has evolved over time.”
What are your plans for after this internship?
Aidan: “I'm going back to Wayne State as a junior. I hope to continue with computer science. And hopefully after undergrad, I will go into grad school for machine learning because this internship really piqued my interest and I love learning about machine learning.”
Cameron: “I just graduated high school from Detroit Country Day. And I'm going to the University of Wisconsin to double major in business and computer science. [Later,] I definitely want to do some sort of focus in machine learning because of this [internship].”
Rhea: “I'm going to my senior year of high school at Troy High. And then after that, I'm planning to major in computer engineering, possibly minor in business. But the one thing that I think really changed for me in this internship is that for so long, I've been so fixated on computer engineering because I really love the hardware components of engineering. But machine learning is like the exact opposite of that [and] I still like it a lot, even though it's so abstract.”
If you were to start the internship over, what would you change?
Aidan: “I would say if we were to restart, it would be very nice to have a concrete plan to start and follow through with having specific milestones because when you're in uncharted territory, it's kind of hard to track, like certain benchmarks.”
Cameron: “I would say one thing I would do for sure is just have done more research on different ways we could have done what we want to do. So, different techniques to try to achieve the same goal.”
Rhea: “First of all, [I would’ve] started earlier in the summer. But in addition to that, [since] it took me a little bit of time to like, gain my bearings with everything that was going on and I spent the first couple of days learning a lot, I wish that I had done that before I even started the internship.”
At Alchemie, a big part of our routine is playing board and card games together over lunch.
What was your favorite lunch game?
Aidan: Mask Men
Cameron: Loop: The Elevated Card Game
Rhea: Love Letter: Princess Princess Ever After
We wish our amazing interns all the best in their future endeavors. We are a learning company, and are so pleased that their summer experiences have been all about learning, experimenting, and growth!