This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Aaditya Chowdhury
It all started in my 5th semester of undergrad. I was desperately looking for internship opportunities amidst a tough job market due to the recession. After applying to various companies without much luck, I stumbled upon a tweet about a dev intern position. Without hesitation, I applied. Before this, I had some experience with the MERN stack and a bit of Python.
A call from Priyanshu at Symmulate Labs changed everything. He told me about an exciting project they were building with Buildspace — an application that creates personalized avatars of famous internet personalities, allowing people to interact with them. I was amazed! They were using RVC voice models and LLMs (Large Language Models) to achieve this. Soon enough, I was onboarded and started designing a cool frontend in Figma and coding it in just a few days. Then, I dived into the backbone of the project: voice conversion. I spent almost two months working on voice conversion models and creating the LLM agent.
By the end of this phase, we had a solid product. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked like a charm. Although we didn’t succeed in the subsequent Buildspace rounds, we focused on attracting more customers and improving the product. We even built a prototype where you could talk to Sadhguru, and it replicated his voice perfectly!
After four months with the team, despite our best efforts, it felt like we had hit a dead end. My internship ended, and I started looking for more opportunities. I secured a remote SWE internship at Gastrogate in Sweden, which made me incredibly happy! But that’s a story for another day.
Out of the blue, Priyanshu called me again with another project idea: an AI-based education platform. This intrigued me as my friends and I had previously tried to build something similar named Aadhya AI. I was hesitant at first, worried about managing so much work and college simultaneously, as I was working full-time with Gastrogate. But I couldn’t let go of such an amazing opportunity, so I said YESSSS.
We started working on the platform immediately. I was coding the frontend, sometimes working 14–16 hours a day. I attended my college lectures for 4–6 hours and spent the rest of the time sitting on my desk, working. We built various chatbots with different capabilities to pitch to companies. The core feature was an AI doubt solver capable of handling university-level STEM questions, generating notes, questions, and more!
Then we hit another roadblock: LLMs were terrible at math. Our competitors had around 50–55% accuracy, and we needed to surpass that to succeed. Priyanshu went all out, pitching our product to book publishers, companies, and even the NCERT office in Delhi! Despite reading numerous blogs, research papers, and consulting with experts, the problem seemed unsolvable. Everyone was stuck where we were.
We brainstormed countless ideas and implemented several of them. We tried Mistral open-source models, OpenAI models, and created an LLM agent. After countless hours, I felt like an LLM guru😎. One approach that worked was separating the mathematical calculations from the questions, solving them using Python, and integrating the results with the Tutor chatbot (sounds simple, right? Not so much to implement 💀). After thousands of lines of prompt engineering and coding, we finally achieved 20% more accuracy than our competitors. It wasn’t as high as we aimed, but it was a significant achievement.
Priyanshu began searching for potential buyers or investors. After numerous meetings and iterations on our chatbot, in May, I received a text: Adda 247, one of the biggest ed-tech firms, wanted to collaborate with us on the project. I was ecstatic! A product I helped build impressed such a major player. Still in college, I had contributed to something that could impact many people.
I remember late nights, staying up until 4 am, working on the chatbot. Priyanshu was always there, working alongside me, and providing support and guidance. Without him, none of this would have been possible. He is one of the coolest and most talented people I have ever met.
This was my journey from learning HTML in my first semester to selling a startup to an ed-tech firm while still in college. I look forward to building more amazing products in the future!
Check out Priyanshu here: Priyanshu on LinkedIn and the rest of the Symmulate Labs Team who made this possible.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Aaditya Chowdhury
Aaditya Chowdhury | Sciencx (2024-10-16T18:19:22+00:00) From Intern to Frontend Developer to Selling a Company in College. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/10/16/from-intern-to-frontend-developer-to-selling-a-company-in-college/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.