We started our internship program in 2019, and now we are running both Summer and Winter internship programs. In this blog post, we share the story of our first interns from Summer 2019 as an interview between our CEO, Hyun Kim, and our interns, Channy and Jaehyun.
How did you start the internship program?
(Hyun) We all know how early-stage startups work — fast-paced, frequent milestones to deliver but with limited resources. Superb AI is no different. With only a handful of engineers earlier this year, we were hyper-focused and prioritized on our most important tasks. We were also delegating many useful features that were not a top priority and machine learning research projects that required longer-term input.
Some of these were relatively independent projects that did not require deep knowledge of the inner workings of our AI feature, and we thought they would be ideal internship projects. Fortunately, we had a lot of interest from internship candidates, and after a rigorous interview process, we decided to welcome two candidates to our Summer Internship program — Channy and Jaehyun.
What did you like the most about working with interns?
(Hyun) One of the things I was very careful about when designing the internship program was making sure it is worthwhile for both the interns and the company. This may sound obvious, but I’ve experienced first-hand and observed in many companies where an intern is assigned to dull, demotivating projects that were not constructive. We planned a highly challenging and intellectually stimulating project that both parties could directly benefit from. At the end of the three months, both interns exceeded our expectations and as a result of their work we could 1) improve our product performance, 2) confirm the feasibility of an experimental feature, and 3) share them with our potential users and hear their feedback. Also as a plus, Jaehyeon is continuing to work with us remotely as a part-time engineer while completing his studies in New York.
Summer 19 Internship Interview
Let’s hear from the interns themselves:
1. How did you find out about Superb AI? Why did you apply?
(Channy) I found out about Superb AI through a TechCrunch article that I read while I was completing my military service in South Korea. As I was reading the article, I was absolutely struck (and in all honesty felt very proud as a fellow Korean) by the fact that there was such a promising (YC-funded, outfitted with an extremely strong engineer team, etc.) startup based in Seoul. I decided to apply for an internship because all my instincts told me that I would be able to grow exponentially under the tutelage of this incredible, fast-paced engineering team.
(Jaehyun) I remember finding out about Superb AI on Facebook when their YC story popped up on my news feed. I was in my senior year in computer science at NYU, but I must say I did not have any sort of expert-level knowledge in the machine learning field. However, Superb AI’s mission statement was what motivated me to apply: “Democratize AI to empower humans everywhere in the world”. Though it may be a personal perception, I always believed that access to AI knowledge and technology, despite the potential power it possesses, was heavily restricted to selective scholars and engineers. I was drawn to join the journey to contribute to Superb AI’s mission: to “democratize” the technology.
2. What was your first impression? Would you recommend interning at Superb AI to your friends? If so, why?
(Channy) My first day at Superb AI was quite literally the day after my discharge from the military; the stark contrast between the slow, monotonous routines of the military that I was used to for the past 21 months versus Superb AI’s incredibly dynamic and high-energy morning scrum on my first day really made a lasting impression on my mind. From that first 10 minutes of my internship, I knew that I had embarked on an exhilarating mini-journey of my own to grow under the tutelage of my supervisor/mentor and also to make a lasting impact on the company’s mission. To those motivated individuals who yearn to learn and grow in a fast-paced startup with a superlative engineering culture, I cannot think of a better place to intern than at Superb AI.
(Jaehyun) My first impression was that I felt the most welcomed at Superb AI compared to my previous internship experiences. It is an unfortunate, yet undeniable truth that most internship programs do not automatically lead to learning and growth. This could be due to one’s lack of competitive skill set or rigid HR decisions. However, at Superb AI, they thoroughly evaluated my past experiences and current skill set to strategically allocate a real project to me that I can output with maximum performance. This not only helped me objectively identify my current skill level as a developer but also enhanced my sense of responsibility as a contributor to the project. Resultantly, I both learned and contributed a lot during the internship. If my peers are looking for an internship program in which they can get a ton of hands-on experience, I can confidently recommend interning at Superb AI.
3. What did you gain during the three months?
(Channy) My internship project at Superb AI was to develop an ML framework for training an encoder that produces what we dubbed “interlingual semantic representations” from a string of text and a label indicating the language of that text; this framework would ultimately allow various NLP models to be trained on top of these “interlingual semantic representations”, which facilitated widely-available English-based training data to be used for training models that solve tasks in non-English languages.
From having barely dabbled in a few NLP implementations with almost no theoretical background before the internship, I was able to produce research-grade code implementations, run appropriate experiments to analyze model performance, and produce a (AAAI-accepted) research paper by the end of my three months at Superb AI. Right from the beginning of this incredible journey, my supervisor (Jungkwon Lee) and mentor (Jaeyeon Lee) helped me calibrate the direction I was to be headed in, and equipped me with the realistic expectations I must have for myself to achieve what I set out to achieve. Then, I was given the (extreme) autonomy to carry out the project on my own and to fluidly ask questions of my mentor/supervisor on a daily basis. Although the project was very self-driven, there were major bottlenecks that I simply could not get past on my own given my lack of expertise and/or experience. Thus, there were countless times throughout my internship when Jungkwon and Jaeyeon would just spontaneously block out 3+ hours of their time and sit down with me in a conference to rapid-fire ideas/insights based on their collective expertise. We would always leave that room with a handful of potential working solutions, and so I was always able to drive my project forward (and thereby grow as an engineer!) at the “Superb AI-pace”.
(Jaehyun) First and foremost, I would like to emphasize how rapidly I developed the scope and depth of my skill set. My internship project was to develop a serverless data processing service that is capable of processing large amounts of data through a meticulously orchestrated flow with several AWS services. Evidently, it requires an in-depth understanding of diverse AWS services and architecture insight to weave such services into a seamless flow. At the beginning of the internship, let alone having no experience in using AWS services, I didn’t even know that some of the AWS services existed. However, after only three months with Superb AI, I can now proudly list AWS as one of my prime skills on my resume. What makes the experience outstanding is how cooperative and caretaking my mentors were. Despite my lack of experience, they never belittled my role as a developer and always shared their insight and knowledge.
4. How does your work/contribution align with the company’s mission?
(Channy) The motivation behind my project was to develop a framework that facilitates low-resource language (i.e. non-English languages) NLP models to be trained using widely available (i.e. English) training data. While the outcome of the project (publishing the paper at AAAI and releasing the code implementations for public use) is merely a single step within this research direction, it nonetheless was intimately aligned with Superb AI’s mission of “democratizing AI to empower humans everywhere in the world”, which in this case was aimed specifically at the realm of non-English languages that lack training data for various NLP tasks. While the project has no direct ties to the services being provided by Superb AI at the moment, I believe that numerous high-level insights gained throughout the project open up a wide array of optimistic possibilities for future applications in the NLP space.
(Jaehyun) As a back-end developer, I’ve contributed to the infrastructure behind the Superb AI Suite, a SaaS platform service built on AWS. My goal was to design and configure a serverless data flow system that ensures a novel user experience in dealing with a large amount of raw data and an annotated dataset, and I also streamlined the underlying dev processes to solve the problem of scalability and speed. Superb AI’s mission is to help AI engineers to build better and faster by providing a one-stop ML data platform service. Regardless of how attractive the service is, the technology could be easily rendered useless if it does not function seamlessly as a whole system. I found it fascinating to see that the result of my summer internship project — a serverless data flow system for Superb AI — helped contribute to the successful launch of Superb AI Suite in December. I decided to keep working as a remote back-end developer and I’m excited to construct a solid backbone system to drive Superb AI’s ambitious goal.
We love watching talented engineers learn and explore the field of machine learning. At Superb AI, we build ML platform services that make AI building and collaboration easier for all stakeholders. Through our program, Interns will be part of the team and gain real experience. If you are interested, you can contact us at careers@superb-ai.com
>>> Our 2019 Winter internship program application is closed. Stay tuned for the 2020 Summer program. Follow our official Twitter channel to get news @superb_hq.
