# Ashish Kumar (whoashish115)

> AI Systems & Research Engineer. Builds AI systems end to end: LLMs from scratch, diffusion and world models, GPU kernels and hardware–software codesign. Undergraduate, class of 2029. This is the playful portfolio; the academic site is https://whoashish.com.


Hey, I'm Ashish, an undergrad (class of 2029) who got hooked on machine learning and never really recovered. What I enjoy most is building AI systems from the ground up. Give me a paper and an empty folder and I'll happily spend a week turning its equations into working layers, then another week finding out why the loss curve looks wrong. Most of that energy goes into large language models: tokenizers, pretraining runs, fine-tuning, evaluation, and the serving code that finally lets you chat with the thing you trained. I like knowing every part of the machine instead of trusting a black box, and I like showing people the numbers, including the unflattering ones. It's slower than stitching existing libraries together, but it's the only way I've found to actually understand what's going on inside. Honestly, watching a model I built from nothing string its first coherent sentence together is still the best feeling I know.

- Language: LLMs, Chatbots, Transformers, Mixture-of-Experts, Tokenizers, Pretraining, Fine-tuning, Reasoning, Long memory, Translation, Coding helpers, Search + RAG, Tiny models, Scaling laws, Evaluation.
- Pictures, video & sound: Diffusion, Image generators, Video generators, Anime art, Style LoRAs, Upscaling, Text-to-speech, Voice cloning, Music AI, Speech to text, Seeing + reading, 3D from photos, Object detection.
- Worlds & agents: World models, AI agents, Game-playing AI, Reinforcement learning, Planning, Simulations, Digital twins, Self-play, Curiosity-driven AI, Looking inside models, AGI.
- Robots: Humanoids, Robot arms, Robot dogs, Self-driving cars, Drones, Robot hands, Home robots, Embodied AI, Sim-to-real, Space rovers, Robot swarms, Exoskeletons.
- Sci-fi dreams: Full-dive VR, AR glasses, Brain–computer links, Holograms, Virtual worlds, AI companions, Digital humans, Smart cities, Space stations, Artificial life, SAO, but safe.
- AI systems: Training at scale, Serving models fast, Many GPUs at once, Memory tricks, Smaller, faster models, Quantization, Distillation, Vector search, Data pipelines, Benchmarks, Speed profiling, Open weights.
- GPUs & chips: GPUs, CUDA, Custom kernels, TPUs, FPGAs, Chip design, Model + chip codesign, Logic gates, Supercomputers, Low-power AI, RISC-V, Computing with light.
- Creative code: Generative art, Ray tracing, Procedural worlds, Cellular automata, Pixel art, Shaders, Physics toys, Little games, Fractals, Pretty maths.
- 46 projects, 503 GitHub stars, 38 generative art sketches.
- Contact: hello@whoashish.com

## Pages

- [Home](https://wsy.moe/): intro, research focus, a short about and how I like to build
- [Projects](https://wsy.moe/projects/): AI & ML and systems projects, with Moonfrost AI and Wintergreen first
- [Archive](https://wsy.moe/archive/): early AI experiments, older web apps, bots, tools and games
- [About](https://wsy.moe/about/): background, interests and life off the keyboard
- [Uses](https://wsy.moe/uses/): languages, libraries and tools I build with
- [Anime & manga](https://wsy.moe/shelf/anime/): everything I have watched and read, from AniList
- [Games](https://wsy.moe/shelf/games/): what I play, via Backloggd
- [Elsewhere](https://wsy.moe/elsewhere/): every profile, from GitHub, Hugging Face, ModelScope, Civitai and Tensor.Art to Google Scholar and ORCID
- [Buy me a coffee](https://wsy.moe/support/): ways to support the research
- [Say hi](https://wsy.moe/contact/): email

## Showcase projects

- [Moonfrost AI](https://github.com/whoashish115/moonfrost-ai): a language model, trained from scratch. A 777M-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model that I took from an empty folder all the way to a chat window. I trained the tokenizer, pretrained it twice, fine-tuned it to hold a conversation, scored it on six benchmarks and wrote the little app it talks through. The attention and expert layers follow DeepSeek-V2, rebuilt from the papers.
- [Wintergreen](https://github.com/whoashish115/wintergreen): vector search, from scratch. Nearest-neighbour search in C++23 with nothing borrowed in the core. Four indexes (Flat, IVF, HNSW and product quantization) share one benchmark that checks every approximate answer against the exact one. Python can call it without copying a single array, and a CLIP demo uses it to search photos.

## Other projects

### Early AI

- [Object Detection (YOLO)](https://github.com/whoashish115/object-detection-using-yolo): Points a tiny YOLO at your webcam or a video and boxes whatever it recognises, labels and confidence included. OpenCV does the heavy lifting.
- [Virtual Assistant](https://github.com/whoashish115/virtual-assistant): A talk-to-it desktop assistant: voice in, GPT replies out, with live system stats and a few automations on a fullscreen screen.

### Systems & GPU

- [HyperTracer](https://github.com/whoashish115/hypertracer): Started as the Ray Tracing in One Weekend book and kept going: CUDA on the GPU, physically based materials, images that sharpen as samples pile up, and scenes generated from code.
- [AutiePie](https://github.com/whoashish115/autiepie): Regular expressions the Thompson way. Patterns become NFAs, matching never backtracks, and time grows linearly with the input. Groups, classes, quantifiers and anchors all work.
- [UwUN](https://github.com/whoashish115/uwun): A tiny VPN in modern C++. Packets leave through a virtual TUN interface and travel inside TLS where both ends have to prove who they are.
- [Hypercube Visualization](https://github.com/whoashish115/hypercube-visualization): Spins cubes that live in four, five, six or more dimensions, then squashes them down to 3D for your eyes. CUDA does the maths; SDL3 and OpenGL draw it.
- [Verilog Notebook](https://github.com/whoashish115/verilog-notebook): My hardware scratchpad: gates and small circuits in Verilog, written on the way to FPGAs.

### Creative code & sims

- [Procedural Maps](https://github.com/whoashish115/procedural-map-generation): Tile maps that build themselves from neighbour-to-neighbour rules, with tools for editing the result by hand. Made with p5.js.
- [Procedural Dungeons](https://github.com/whoashish115/procedural-dungeon-generation): Dungeon layouts pieced together from pattern rules and tidied with small local tweaks, generated live in the browser.
- [Space Colonization](https://github.com/whoashish115/space-colonization-algorithm): Trees, roots and veins grown with the space colonization algorithm, in 2D and 3D, sped up with CUDA.
- [Gene Archive](https://github.com/whoashish115/gene-archive): Stores files as DNA letters. This command-line tool encodes data into bases, adds sequencing errors on purpose, then uses parity to get the original back.
- [Sketches](https://github.com/whoashish115/sketches): 38 small generative artworks. Each one starts from a simple rule and a little randomness, repeated until a shape shows up.
- [Conway's Game of Life](https://github.com/whoashish115/conway-game-of-life): Conway's Game of Life running on CUDA. Four rules, zero players, and still somehow full of surprises.
- [Sacred Geometry](https://github.com/whoashish115/sacred-geometry): Circles and a handful of compass rules, repeated into calm, symmetric patterns that could go on forever.

### Web apps

- [Niko Waves](https://github.com/whoashish115/niko-waves): An anime streaming and discovery site. Next.js and React in front, Bun and Hono behind, Firebase for accounts.
- [Wonder Hive](https://github.com/whoashish115/wonder-hive): A social network with live chat, stories, notifications and themes. Next.js in front; Express, MongoDB and Socket.IO behind.
- [Med Experts](https://github.com/whoashish115/med-experts): A landing page template for a physiotherapy clinic, with appointment booking, patient testimonials and a dark mode. Live: https://med-experts-chi.vercel.app
- [Retro Palace](https://github.com/whoashish115/retro-palace): Make tiny 88×31 web buttons like it's 2003: stack layers, animate them and export the result.
- [Aether Nest](https://github.com/whoashish115/aether-nest): Save, make and sort visual inspiration into Flashes and Boards, with the social bits around them.
- [Bit Space](https://github.com/whoashish115/bit-space): An ASCII art studio in the browser: draw with characters, turn photos into text art or write big FIGlet banners. Live: https://bit-space-omega.vercel.app
- [Neuro Vance](https://github.com/whoashish115/neuro-vance): A landing page for a made-up tech company, mostly an excuse to play with smooth motion and interactive sections.
- [Blocky Net](https://github.com/whoashish115/blocky-net): A blogging platform with posts, accounts, an admin dashboard, analytics and a small crypto prices corner.
- [Luxe Artifacts](https://github.com/whoashish115/luxe-artifacts): A Web3-flavoured landing page that's really about immersive animation and a futuristic look.
- [Nova Social](https://github.com/whoashish115/nova-social): A social app with live chat, calls and stories, and more ways to make it yours than it probably needs.
- [Solid Explore](https://github.com/whoashish115/solid-explore): A point-and-click builder for advanced search queries across several search engines, so you never have to memorise the operators. Live: https://solid-explore.vercel.app
- [Terminal Portfolio](https://github.com/whoashish115/terminal-portfolio): A portfolio template you drive by typing commands, with ASCII art and switchable themes. Live: https://terminal-portfolio-five-eta.vercel.app
- [Baka Pager](https://github.com/whoashish115/baka-pager): Flip through a GitHub user's followers and following one profile at a time, pulled from the GraphQL API. Live: https://baka-pager.vercel.app
- [Giggle Charisma](https://github.com/whoashish115/giggle-charisma): A meme maker with the classic templates, your own pictures and drag-and-drop captions. Live: https://giggle-charisma.vercel.app
- [Vox Cell](https://github.com/whoashish115/vox-cell): Pixel art in the browser: layers, palettes, drawing tools, filters and export. Live: https://vox-cell.vercel.app
- [Nyron Ring](https://github.com/whoashish115/nyron-ring): A starter kit for your own webring: member directory, tag search, one shared RSS feed and an embeddable ring widget. Live: https://nyron-ring.vercel.app
- [Moonfrost Site](https://github.com/whoashish115/moonfrost-ai-site): The public home page of my language model. A static Next.js site.

### Games

- [Cyber Swarm Escape](https://github.com/whoashish115/cyber-swarm-escape): A 2D arcade survival game: keep the baby safe while mosquito swarms close in.
- [Void Break](https://github.com/whoashish115/void-break): Brick breaker with 100 generated levels, power-ups, bricks that fight back and high scores that stick around.
- [Cube Cracker](https://github.com/whoashish115/cube-cracker): A Rubik's Cube in 3D. Turn the faces, orbit the camera, and let it solve itself by unwinding your moves.
- [Sudoku Solver](https://github.com/whoashish115/sudoku-solver): Makes 9×9 Sudoku puzzles, lets you play them, and solves them with recursive backtracking while checking your moves.
- [Space Shooter](https://github.com/whoashish115/space-shooter): A scrolling space shooter with asteroids, aliens, a boss fight and proper arcade scoring.
- [Snake Game](https://github.com/whoashish115/snake-game): Snake with smooth controls, computer rivals and several difficulty levels, drawn with PyQt6.

### Bots & tools

- [GitHub Avatar Crawler](https://github.com/whoashish115/github-avatar-crawler): Walks GitHub followers and following to whatever depth you pick and saves everyone's profile picture.
- [Solistra Bot](https://github.com/whoashish115/solistra-bot): A Telegram bot for anime and manga: search titles and characters, check schedules and reviews, keep a watchlist, even search by picture.
- [Maze Flux](https://github.com/whoashish115/maze-flux): Draw a maze and watch A* find its way through it. A desktop app in PyQt6.
- [Auralis Bot](https://github.com/whoashish115/auralis-bot): A Discord bot that fetches the latest news by keyword or category, built from small discord.py modules.
- [Library Management](https://github.com/whoashish115/library-management): Desktop software for running a library: books, students, issues, returns and late fines, backed by MySQL.
- [Moe Kaiketsu](https://github.com/whoashish115/moe-kaiketsu): A browser extension that puts an anime character above every Codeforces problem, picked per problem and tagged your way.
- [Archive Toolkit](https://github.com/whoashish115/archive-toolkit): A few small tools for archiving and backing up your own stuff.

## Profiles

- [GitHub](https://github.com/whoashish115)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/whoashish115)
- [Kaggle](https://www.kaggle.com/whoashish115)
- [ModelScope](https://www.modelscope.ai/profile/whoashish115)
- [Civitai](https://civitai.com/user/whoashish115)
- [Tensor.Art](https://tensor.art/u/1048940538838970806)
- [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rBTxVa0AAAAJ)
- [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6960-9939)
- [Academic site](https://whoashish.com)
- [Writeups](https://whoashish.com/writeups)
- [Weights & Biases](https://wandb.ai/whoashish115-base/moonfrost-777m)
- [Email](mailto:hello@whoashish.com)
- [X](https://x.com/whoashish115)
- [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/whoashish115.bsky.social)
- [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@whoashish115)
- [Matrix](https://matrix.to/#/@whoashish115:matrix.org)
- [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/whoashish115)
- [Zenn](https://zenn.dev/whoashish115)
- [Chess.com](https://www.chess.com/member/whoashish115)
- [AniList](https://anilist.co/user/mage9/)
- [Backloggd](https://backloggd.com/u/mage9/games/)
- [CList](https://clist.by/coder/whoashish115/)
- [Digital Garden](https://digitalgarden.whoashish.com)

## Optional

- [llms-full.txt](https://wsy.moe/llms-full.txt): every project with languages, topics and star counts