A 20k Subscriber Thank You

What this thing is / what can we do for you?

Feb 20, 2023

Hello! To the many of you who have joined us since we launched our Substack, whether you joined us a year ago or more recently, welcome!

Today, 20,000 of you are receiving this email—this is a big milestone for our little volunteer project, and we thought this would be a great opportunity to re-introduce ourselves and what we’re doing with The Gradient.

The Gradient: Past and Present

Where have we been, and where are we now?

Founded by a few people in the Stanford AI Lab nearly five years ago, we were created with the mission to provide accessible, sophisticated coverage of the latest in AI research. At thegradient.pub, inspired by distill.pub, we primarily hosted essays: here’s our first editors note, and some early essays we published with Shreya Shankar and Sebastian Ruder.

Today, The Gradient aims to give you something more than “the latest in AI.” Over the pandemic, we expanded beyond hosting essays into a newsletter and a podcast—both align with our core mission, but we hope they reach you in different ways.

What role does The Gradient play?

If you’re a casual reader/listener, we’re an email (ok, lots of emails) showing up in your inbox every so often. Those emails include articles about AI, newsletters with the latest on AI, and interviews with people within the AI world. We are also the maintainer of the AI-centric Mastodon instance Sigmoid Social.

Understanding a field as complex as AI requires far more than knowing what happened—news is always flavored with perspective, while research involves argumentation along with science. We hope The Gradient can provide a valuable synthesis of perspectives, both from the various research areas within AI and from varied disciplines concerned with AI systems’ abilities, limitations, and impacts.

Who We Are

We’re a collection of grad students and engineers who decided this was a great use of our spare time—we’re entirely volunteer-run. Here’s a bit about each of us:

Andrey Kurenkov: PhD student (almost done !!) at Stanford
Ather Fawaz: Software Engineer at Noon
Daniel Bashir: ML Compiler Engineer at AWS
Derek Lim: PhD Student at MIT
Hugh Zhang: PhD Student at Harvard
Jonathan Xue: High School Student & our first intern !
Justin Landay: Senior Data Scientist at Etsy
Kiran Vadhiya: PhD Student at Radboud University Medical Center
Marco Cognetta: PhD Student at Tokyo University of Technology & PhD Student Researcher at G o o g l e
Tanmay Agarwal: MS Student at Stanford

Going Forward

If you’re new here, you’re probably familiar with our newsletter or podcast. We plan to continue both of these initiatives along with our articles. Long-term, we hope to be able to compensate authors for their work, but that’s not financially feasible for us just yet. The funds we do have are spent on hosting Sigmoid Social and services/software for hosting and producing our website and podcast.

We’re lucky to have around 100 paid subscribers—just about everything we do is free access, so any support for us is out of the goodness of your hearts :)

Despite our general lack of social media aptitude, we do appreciate all of you for joining us and reading what we and our guest authors post. We’d love to see how we can draw on your collective experience and knowledge to understand how we can make this project more interesting and useful for you all—do let us know if you ever have feedback, either in Substack comments or by email at editor@thegradient.pub. If you like what we’re doing, do consider sharing our work with a friend, family member, colleague, neighbor, enemy, estranged lover.

Gradient Prize 2023

For the past few years, we’ve been running a Prize competition for essays published on thegradient.pub. We plan to do this again for 2023 (some details TBA). If you’re interested in entering a piece for the Prize you can pitch here, and you can reach us at our email (editor@thegradient.pub) if you’re interested in being involved in any other capacity.