p.01 · Notebook Nº 03 · Bangalore · Tonight's set

    Samarth Saraswat,
    AI builder.

    SetupI’ve got the Heart of a Product Builder,Brain of an Engineerand Greed of a Salesperson

    Punchbecause passion doesn't pay the rent.

    What can I do for you?

    Bring me the messy problem. I'll build the AI agent, the RAG, the model, or talk you out of all three.

    TagIIT Guwahati taught me to take problems seriously. Stand-up Comedy taught me not to take myself seriously.

    Samarth Saraswat holding a microphone, lit blue on one side and amber on the other
    fig. 1: the only good photo I have

    The day job, briefly

    Now

    AI Engineer, Tazapay

    AI for fraud detection and anti-money laundering in cross-border payments.

    Before · 3+ years

    Data Scientist, Microsoft

    Built Seller Copilot, an AI for enterprise sales. Stopped $100M+ a year in revenue leakage.

    Go to my LinkedIn if you care about my job.

    p.02

    p.02 · Who

    The fine print.

    Index card · the facts

    Now
    AI Engineer, Tazapay
    Before
    Data Scientist, Microsoft · 3+ years
    School
    B.Tech, Electronics & Communication, IIT Guwahati, 2022
    Also
    YC Startup School, Bangalore · the first edition there, April 2026
    Based in
    Bangalore, India
    Off hours
    Stand-up comedy. The mic is not a prop.

    Buzzwords I can back up

    AI systems

    LLM copilots & agentsRAG & hybrid retrievalOn-device inferenceEvals & golden setsFraud & AML detection

    Machine learning

    NLPSpeech recognitionAnomaly detectionModel evaluationDeep learning

    Product

    AI product managementExperimentationOKRs & North Star metricsMetric design

    Tools

    PythonPyTorchLangGraphClaude CodeCodexSQL
    p.03

    p.03 · Built · Open source

    Things I built, then gave away.

    Two of these run entirely on the device in your hand or on your desk, with nothing sent anywhere. The third is a free study hub. All three are on GitHub.

    Exp.01

    Exp.01 · On-device AI · Android

    Survive AI

    An offline-first survival assistant that runs a 2B language model and a retrieval pipeline entirely on an Android phone.

    fig. 2 · On-device AI · Android

    works with zero bars!

    Lab results

    Runs on
    Android, 6 GB RAM, zero bytes sent at runtime
    Model
    Gemma 2B IT, INT4, CPU backend
    Retrieval
    Recall@5 89.7% hybrid vs 81.5% keyword-only
    Stack
    Flutter, SQLite FTS5, ONNX Runtime, Python build step
    +read the full lab notes

    Emergencies take the network with them. Floods drop cell towers, shutdowns remove the rest, and the moment someone needs to know what to do about a snakebite or a gas leak is the moment they cannot look it up.

    Survive AI answers “kutte ne kaata” or “chest pain” with no bars. Eighteen India-specific guides are searched with three retrieval legs (BM25, query expansion with romanised Hindi, and a dense encoder), fused with weighted reciprocal rank fusion, and handed to Gemma 2B through an instruction-last prompt tuned for small models. Every answer cites the paragraph it came from, and an output guard blocks anything the guides forbid.

    Exp.02

    Exp.02 · Local speech · macOS

    Desi Dictation

    Local-first Hinglish dictation for macOS. Hold a key, speak the way you actually talk, release, and Roman-script Hinglish lands in whatever app you are typing in.

    fig. 3 · Local speech · macOS

    1.47 s on an M3 Air

    Lab results

    Runs on
    macOS, Apple Silicon, fully local
    Latency
    0.21 s English, 1.47 s Hinglish per dictation (M3 Air)
    Models
    Oriserve Whisper-Hindi2Hinglish, Parakeet TDT, Vaani
    Stack
    Swift, SwiftUI, whisper.cpp, Metal, Silero VAD
    +read the full lab notes

    Dictation tools understand English or Hindi. Nobody in Bangalore talks like that. “Kal meeting hai, please deck ready rakhna” is one sentence, and it should land as one sentence.

    A global hotkey captures 16 kHz audio, whisper.cpp runs a Hinglish fine-tuned Whisper on Metal, a user dictionary cleans it up, and a pasteboard swap drops the text into the focused app. No cloud, no subscription, runs on a MacBook Air. The current beta ships five curated models with per-language defaults, voice-activity pause handling, chunked transcription for long dictation, and a warm-mic pre-roll so the first word is never lost.

    Exp.03

    Exp.03 · Community · Free study hub

    Data Science Preparation

    A free, hosted study hub for anyone preparing for data science and machine learning roles.

    fig. 4 · Community · Free study hub

    free. no sign-up. ever.

    Lab results

    Lives at
    GitHub Pages, rebuilt on every push
    Format
    7 MkDocs Material sites, one hub
    For
    Anyone. No sign-up, no paywall
    +read the full lab notes

    Seven self-contained knowledge bases, built as independent MkDocs sites and stitched under one landing page: Mathematics, Classical ML, Deep Learning, LLMs, Agentic AI, Productionizing ML, and twenty ML system-design case studies with full interview transcripts.

    It also doubles as a knowledge base for AI agents. A machine-readable index maps every topic to its page, with a citation protocol so an agent can say what it already knew versus what it went and looked up.

    p.05

    p.05 · Crowd work · Raise a ticket

    Got a messy problem? Raise a ticket.

    AI product work, collaborations, or a friendly argument about where AI is headed. The ticket lands straight in my inbox.

    Support ticket

    ····

    Priority