Audrey McKnight
Co-founder and CTO of Feya. Senior at NYU in Computer Science and Philosophy, with minors in Math and Japanese.
Now
Feya
David and Illya brought me a problem: they wanted a compute network with its own unit of exchange, but how do you get a network of average devices to do valuable AI work? My answer was to split a large model into pieces and run each piece on a different device, chained together over the public internet.
I coded the entire functional app end to end, model splitting included. On the business side I pitched Feya at the Solana office in San Francisco and made the Solana relationship that landed our first compute partnership.
“Most people's economic stake in AI is their job, which is exactly the asset AI devalues. So how do we give people a stake in the future?”
NYU
Admitted as an Honors Scholar, a program built around research that took me to NYU's Florence and Buenos Aires campuses.
NYU Philosophy Forum
The Forum hosts the yearly undergraduate philosophy conference and publishes a yearly philosophy journal; past keynote speakers include David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel and Saul Kripke.
Cephalo
A search engine over 25,000 Semantic Scholar papers that benchmarks four retrieval methods against each other on a shared query set. Papers are represented as 64-dimensional hyperbolic embeddings in a Poincaré ball and reranked by hyperbolic distance.
High school
- 3rd place nationally, National Japan Bowl, Level 3
- AIME qualifier, and a Certificate of Distinction for my AMC score
- Dual-enrolled by junior year: multivariable calculus and linear algebra at George Mason, computer science at Cornell
- Science Olympiad: 1st place regionally in Sound of Music; also Circuit Lab, Detector Building and Cryptography
- Codefy mentor: taught a semester-long class on Java data structures to high and middle schoolers, plus one-on-one sessions
- Founded my school's NACLO club for computational linguistics
- Math Club vice president; Mu Alpha Theta math honor society
- Flute choir, six years (I was also 1st chair of the 1st section): toured Tuscany playing in churches across the region, performed with students at an Italian music school, and won an award for excellence at Universal Studios
Early work
The Lemongrab guitar
An electric guitar I built, shaped like Lemongrab from Adventure Time: a wooden body and neck I cut and assembled, with a real pickup and a volume knob.
The Shoebox
My own Google Home: a music-focused voice assistant built on Google's AIY Voice Kit and a Raspberry Pi. Ask for an artist, an album or a song and it finds the track in its own library, indexed at startup from each file's name. Each side of the box is my drawing of a favorite album cover. Its planned personality, per my design sheet: Mean. Code
# real responses from its code (asked on a Wednesday) you> play music box> Would you like to play from an artist, play an album, or a specific song? you> what day of the week is it box> It is wednesday my dudes. box> REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE [button pressed] box> ow! Stop it, you FOOL.
The Row-Bot
My 8th-grade math independent project: an AI in Python that plays the board game Ducks in a Row, using minimax with alpha-beta pruning, to find how far it must look ahead to beat a human consistently. With about 30 legal moves per position, five moves of look-ahead means over 24 million positions; on the computer I had, anything past three took 15+ minutes a move, and capped at three it lost about half its games to experienced players.
- Black Knight Simulator, a Unity game in C#: sever all the Black Knight's limbs to win
- Salamander Lord of All Recorders, an Android game where you play the recorder to please the Salamander Lord, with a trip to Flavortown hosted by Guy Fieri
- Pollution-mask spray, my 3M Young Scientist Challenge invention, for making cheap cloth masks filter pollutants
- Adjustable Gripbox, my Future Engineers entry for 3D designs for space, modeled in Fusion 360
- A model rocket of my own design, built to drop a folded note in someone's yard; the note was a link to a certain Rick Astley video
- Short stories: New Life Project, Lil' Jim Jam's Big Adventure, Mr. Fish, Yo Duh Life