Anson Chu

Writing

RL

• 2016–2026 Player of Games my journey into RL: five projects, one thread — have the AI play games
• 2026 RL is back everyone said LLM, LLM, LLM — two parties, a bitter lesson, and the bet paying off
• 2025–2026 Learning RL with Claude reading self-generated lessons instead of the feed — two of them, kept

LLMs

• 2023 Neural Networks: Zero to Hero 9 posts — course notes and by-hand backprop derivations, written on parental leave

Building

• 2023 Numerai Tutorial Notebooks
• 2022 Burning Man Art Project — The Heads
• 2015 Uber Geolocation with Wifi — my first patent

Leadership

• 2023 How to hire and build a great team
• 2020 Anson API communication as an API spec — a numerai friday-night talk, slides included
• 2019 Agile: A Software Engineering Discipline software engineering history for a team of mathematicians — Turing to the Manifesto
• 2018 Executing with OKRs the pitch that became how the company runs