David Yenicelik

I work on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Crypto at Stingray AI.

Previously, I co-founded Skilllab to gamify career transitions, similar to skill-trees in games. Initially motivated by the 2015 European Migration Crisis, Skilllab engages with public and private employment services used by millions of people. I developed a recommender engine using both traditional matrix factorization methods, deep learning and LLM techniques to navigate people through career transitions.

I've worked on LLMs since 2018, publishing one of the first papers on whether LLMs capture the notion of “meaning”. We were fortunate enough to earn the ~$1M Google AI Impact grant for my work at Skilllab.

Before that, I was working on the ETH Hyperloop project, building out the first team and convincing stakeholders to provide us with resources (such as an airplane hangar). The project was integrated into the ETH B.Sc. programme after achieving 3rd place in the SpaceX Hyperloop competition.

I started coding at the age of 11, learning to read English by playing with the W3 docs and dabbling on hackthissite.org , which then led me to do CTF. I later on studied Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where I fell in love with linear algebra and applied machine learning. To this day, I am generally quite curious about math- & data-heavy software challenges, especially in the Crypto domains, where I have been working on MEV and yield farming in the past.

I often find myself learning about history and state theory, love good food, and am passionate about Brazilian jiu-jitsu.