Hi, I’m Bogdan, a computer science student at EPFL, currently pulling on the thread of AI to see where it leads. This pursuit is worthwhile to me because I’ve always been curious about where intelligence and consciousness come from. My most efficient way of learning is to try doing things myself, so pursuing AI as a means to understand intelligence feels natural. This approach is visible in my latest projects, which aim to rebuild architectures like transformers and world models from scratch, using only research papers as reference.
I grew up in Bucharest, where I spent my whole life before moving to Lausanne. Romania was behind the Iron Curtain, and even today people from diverse backgrounds are a rare encounter, especially in pre-university education. Part of what drew me to EPFL was the prospect of being in a place where different cultures and ways of thinking coexist.
I chose to leave Romania and go to EPFL with the hope of spending the coming years in an environment designed around personal growth, where people are encouraged to learn and to speak their minds. Even from the first week, when I left the library at 7pm on a Sunday, there were still plenty of people around. It’s one thing to study alone, and a whole other to raise your eyes and see other people going through the same process.
During high school, I co-founded Pentra, a cybersecurity startup that automated penetration testing report writing using AI. We won InnovationLabs, raised 150k from a VC, and had a real run at it, before my co-founders and I each went to university and took the difficult decision to wind it down. Before this valuable experience, I have also interned at Deloitte as a Software Engineer over a summer and took up various pet projects, mainly to do with LLMs and Blockchain.
Plus, another perk of being in Switzerland is, of course, skiing, of which I do as much as I reasonably can. Apart from that, I developed a habit of reading before going to sleep, and slowly but surely reading became an important part of my life. Fiction, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, from Montaigne to Andy Clark (both of whom I’m reading at the time of writing this), and everything in between.