Tom Yeh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and the creator of AI by Hand, a wildly popular educational newsletter and community that teaches transformers, LLMs, and deep learning architectures through pen-and-paper calculations. With 62,000+ Substack subscribers, 200,000+ social media followers, and a Feynman-inspired philosophy that you only truly understand what you can build by hand, Yeh has become one of the most influential voices in practical AI education - bridging the gap between black-box hype and genuine first-principles understanding.
Dilawar Mahmood is a machine learning engineer at ZeroEntropy (YC W25) in San Francisco, best known for four years at Apple where he optimized on-device models for Siri and Spotlight - work he once presented directly to Tim Cook at the Steve Jobs Theater. A Norwegian-educated engineer who left a comfortable career track to attend the Recurse Center and rediscover what programming actually feels like, he builds distributed ML frameworks in his spare time and is on record hating vibe coding.