Stability in the Age of AI
Why societal stability rests on stable income, and what could replace it in an age of AI.
The Owl and the Sparrows: Intelligence, Control, and the Future of Human Purpose
Reflections on Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: the control problem, moral responsibility, and human purpose.
The AI Company I'd Love to Create
The AI company that I think may have either huge potential or will instantly flop. Either way, here's some non wrapper wishful thinking for how I want to use the technology.
On the Future of Work with AI
How AI will shape the future of work, and how humanity will actually achieve bigger and better.
My Trip to Silicon Valley: Insights and Innovations
A week in Silicon Valley opened my eyes to the future of technology, from AI and robotics to the culture of collaboration that drives innovation.
Recommended reading
Superintelligence
Building something smarter than us means thinking seriously about how we’ll live alongside it. I think alignment has to preserve our ability to grow and revise our values. And even if we get safety right, what happens to human purpose when our contributions are no longer necessary?
Ishmael
The stories we inherit shape who we think we are and how we act. When we only hear one story, it becomes hard to recognize it as a story at all. I think changing how we live starts with questioning the assumptions we’ve learned to treat as inevitable.
Organic Startup Ideas
I think the best founders are always building things to solve inconveniences in their lives, big and small. They keep noticing problems and making things better. Starting a company grows out of that habit.
The Bitter Lesson
Sutton argues that general methods built to benefit from more computation, especially search and learning, ultimately outperform approaches built around human knowledge.
For startups and founding teams
Karthik Thyagarajan is a founder-engineer studying Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Purdue. At Samsung Research America, he co-architected an always-on AI agent runtime for XR glasses. He is currently building Tavi, a voice teammate for engineering standups, and co-founded buildpurdue, a founder community at Purdue. His work spans agent infrastructure, on-device AI, product engineering, and evaluation.
For an early team building AI products, his strongest demonstrated fit is owning a broad technical problem from product decisions through implementation and evaluation. His current interests are live voice and video AI, AI-first wearables, and infrastructure that lets agents discover and use internet services.
Substantial ownership of agent systems
At Samsung Research America (May to August 2026), he co-architected an always-on agent orchestrator in Kotlin and owned half of a 25+ module runtime. His reported on-device router achieved 95% signal suppression and 90% intent-routing accuracy. His work also covered tool permissions, model routing, memory, and phone control, connecting model behavior to a usable device experience.
Builds teams and operating systems around a problem
As buildpurdue's co-founder and co-president, he helped turn an informal gathering into a founder community with a selective cohort, weekly co-working, funding, and founder-led problem-solving workshops. He built much of its web platform and integrated CRM, applications, events, and check-ins. His account describes data on around 500 students and a mailing list of about 1,000.
Makes technical claims testable
He built PARM, an open-source causal benchmark for when an agent should use personal memory: 157 frozen scenarios and 471 executable cases, with deterministic scoring and versioned replay artifacts. Its portfolio account explicitly distinguishes development results from held-out claims. He also built google-tools-mcp, a published MCP server exposing 169 Google Workspace tools through one OAuth flow.
Pursues difficult product problems
He is currently building Tavi, a voice teammate intended to answer codebase questions and handle small action items during engineering standups. The project tackles multi-person turn-taking, when to stay quiet, sandboxed coding, and synthetic meeting evaluations. This is ongoing work, rather than a claim of shipped adoption. His published interests explain the direction behind it.
Co-founder who ships and thinks about distribution
At Repple (November 2025 to June 2026), he co-founded a competitive fitness app released on the App Store and built the entire FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and Supabase backend, including synchronized workouts, ELO matchmaking, and weekly competition logic. His firsthand account also describes marketing before the UI existed, campus distribution, and why local community density mattered to the product.
This brief summarizes Karthik's public portfolio and firsthand accounts. Employment contributions and internal performance metrics are self-reported; linked code and artifacts provide additional evidence where available.