Hello world 👀

I am the founder of @luciddreams_bot and hubba.ai. For almost a year (entire 2024, woah!), we've been building in radio silence. Internet produced many crazy theories on who the team behind our products is, but none of the conspiracy guys were right. So, I decided to take the initiative to help them 😁

So, hello and welcome to my channel! To those who don't know me, let me introduce myself:

– I started in machine learning in 2017, back when the greatest accomplishments of the field were word2vec and GAN. The best use of the transformer architecture was Google Translate, and the most advanced image generators were only capable of producing blurry pictures of humans.

– For the following 5 years I worked as a researcher and a software engineer in a wide range of fields starting from algorithmic trading to cryptography and cybersec. I've got to work on many important projects, which I may tell more about in the future.

– The turning point was the release of ChatGPT. For someone who remembered language models struggling with basic English, that definitely was a "holy f*ck" moment. It've been incredibly hard to internalize how a fairly simple gradient descent algorithm could produce entities capable of general intelligence.

– For the next week, I've decided to lock myself up in a room to catch up with the latest ML papers of the time. After some sleepless nights, it became clear to me that deep learning had no "wall" or visible bound other than compute and data. As both are solvable in a matter of time, this meant to me that we enter an upwards spiral of rapid AI advances.

7 days later, I decided to stop my participation in all projects I had at the time to completely focus my efforts on AI. Looking back, that was probably one of the best decisions of my life.

This will be an intense job, but it's totally worth it. Apply here:

https://unique-drifter-c36.notion.site/16ba993f07b680bcbf76daa6545c889c

Application deadline is Jan 9 23:59 UTC. I will personally review every application and contact the most notable applicants before Jan 12.

@luciddreams_community_bot 🤫

Before we move on, huge thanks to everyone who applied. With this channel being just a few weeks old, we received over 100 applications (and that's during the peak holiday season!). Wild. I reviewed every submission, and after a thorough selection process, we found exactly who we were looking for.

Welcome JenesisKennedy to the team! Many of you already know him as an admin of one of our most active fan communities. I'm stoked to make his contributions official and amplify his impact across the entire project.

A few words on our plans: Our belief is that community is the ultimate QA team. A product is good if people love it, period. Our mission is to build a continuos feedback system to iteratively improve our products based on users' input.

Yesterday we launched our first English-speaking Lucid Dreams community. More languages and platforms are coming soon. We welcome everyone who cares about our products and has meaningful feedback to join via @luciddreams_community_bot.

Oh, and one last thing - I still think "Community Manager" doesn't do the role justice. We need a better title. How about:

🗿 Chief Community Officer
🤓 User Success Manager
❤️‍🔥 Head of Horny Resources

Here's a question I always ask myself before posting: "What's the most valuable insight that I know but 99.9% of people don't?" My goal is to share knowledge, not to be a parrot 🦜

I've been writing code since I was a kid, I was working with data analysis and machine learning for years, and now I'm building AI products for over 7 million users. Perhaps, this gives me a unique perspective on certain things.

First off, I think 99.9% of people don't realize how quickly the business world is changing. AI agents are already streamlining workflows and automating operations, ML algorithms are already making more informed (and smarter!) decisions than humans, product prototyping is already 3-5 times faster and cheaper when using tools like Cursor and Clade Code.

In @luciddreams and hubba.ai, we've always seen that as our competitive edge. Our vision is to build our entire business around data pipelines and ML systems. And I say business, not only products – because AI integration compounds over time. Having a lean team that uses AI as a leverage is a superpower.

Secondly, I feel like 99.9% of people underestimate what they can personally achieve with AI. It's true that everyone can code now – I've seen some of our marketing guys learn programming in a week and build complex tools to significantly streamline their work after a little more than a month. That used to take 1-2 years in 2022.

In fact, even this post was refined in 10 versions by Grok and then ran through an LLM simulation loop to evaluate how the audience would perceive it. A model of you, the average reader of my channel, liked this version the most and that's why you're reading it.

Isn't AI cool?

That's a perfect example of how underexplored language models are to this day. This tool is remarkably helpful for writing, and can be implemented in just a few prompts to o1 pro. There were only two engineering problems to solve:

1. How to simulate audience?
I didn't invent the technique I used – I learned about it from this excellent paper from August 2024. In a nutshell, it demonstrated that language models can predict social survey results with surprising accuracy.

How? Authors simply asked an LLM to roleplay as an average person who is X years old, has Y political views and so on. Then they asked it survey questions - and the statistical distribution of its answers turned out to closely match real human survey results.

A practical example would be sending a piece of text to ChatGPT and asking: "What would be the comments under this post?" or "Rate the likely reader sentiment from 1 to 10." In fact, that's exactly what my tool does (with just a little bit more context about the target audience).

2. How to automatically refine text?
I drew inspiration from this recent DeepMind paper about using evolutionary algorithms for LLM sampling. The idea is very simple: generate a response, create N variations of it, select the best one, then go back to step 1. The paper proposes a more complex "island model" evolving multiple populations in parallel, but I found the simpler approach equally effective.

That's it! I combined these two ideas by uploading the papers and asking o1 pro to write the project specification, create a plan of action, and finally program the tool. Took me less than an hour in total. Put 🔥 if you want me to publish the code on GitHub.

By the way, I haven't seen this algorithm in any commercial product yet. Perhaps a good startup opportunity? 🤔

Yesterday, @luciddreams_bot became unavailable to millions of our iOS and Android users.

Within hours after the ban, our team identified and removed all pornographic content that was previously publicly available in the bot. Additionally, we began implementing an optional setting allowing users to hide all NSFW content from their private conversations with AI.

Despite being a top-5 grossing app on Telegram, we didn't receive any advance warnings or even a notification after the fact – instead, we learned about the ban directly from our users.

We contacted all available Telegram support accounts with a request for clarification, but none of them responded or even read our messages. Dear Telegram, we need your response 🙏

To our best knowledge, Lucid Dreams should now be compliant with the Telegram terms – so we launched a mirror bot for our iOS and Android users at @lucid_dreams_ai_bot and @luciddreams. All your settings and in-game purchases will synchronize between all our bots.