24th Birthday Review

29 Jul, 2026

I just had my 24th birthday yesterday.

Since it has been a very bumpy ride this past year, I am very willing to self-reflect and give an honest review of lessons learned from my past year and what I should consider improving.

My 23rd year in life happens to sit in the context of a very bizarre historical window. The current US president is respectfully a warmonger and insider (pronounced “public”) trader who has been preparing for a tech + trade (+ anything in his mind) war with China and the rest of the world; making F1 and H1-B more restrictive than ever is only part of the growing pains, a negligible sacrifice on the road to American greatness. Who cares about a foreign nobody’s “American dream”? Outdated concept, indeed.

We are entering an AGI era. Per its narrowest definition, “artificial general intelligence” has already been achieved. Generations of large language models have reshaped the whole world, and as a new MS grad, my software engineering expertise is already obsolete. Who cares about your resume if you only have < 1 year of industry experience? The resume screening has also been replaced by AI, thankfully, so I did not embarrass myself as no human has ever read my resume anyway. Phew, what a relief!

That being said, I am not a Luddite; nor do I plan to go down with the SWE job market into the abyss. I have been focusing on academic research ever since my undergraduate studies, and have continued to keep a profile in the academic field. Thus I still have a retreat route — not the brightest, I know. Everyone knows that academia is the hardest route of all, and you can even consider my last two years a failed attempt to pivot away from academia. Now that I think of it, maybe just as the saying goes, a stormy wind could easily blow you away when you don’t have deep roots. My open-source profile isn’t that prominent, nor have I developed a visible profile as an internet celebrity — I should’ve known.

Therefore I recently went to China, to Beijing, to work as a research scientist at a research startup. As an Asian, I really appreciate the time in an Asian environment, getting to enjoy the culture, and especially the Chinese food. I do have my own opinions on Chinese politics, but they rarely matter as they have trivial impact on my life; unlike the United States, where an orange fellow can dictate the rule of law and remove immigrants en masse, stalling immigration opportunities. Ah sorry, no more trash-talking about the great, greatest president of the United States. I wish him the best of luck in his 4th presidential election in 2028.

Artificial intelligence has just been generally rolled out in the form of commercial LLM products in the past 3 years, and it has become the infrastructure of everything. The same is true in scientific research. Terence Tao recently gave a public lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2026 (the same conference where two Chinese mathematicians won Fields medals), on “Mathematics in the age of AI.”¹ Basically, Tao argues that while the current AI can be trained and optimized to provide mathematical proofs verifiable by Lean, the goal of solving a mathematical problem is not only about that — we also need the proofs to be well-written (as in “easy parts are easy to read, and difficult parts are emphasized and carefully explained”, i.e. easy to follow), accepted by the math community, and to become the new consensus in the math world by making its way into textbooks. These goals seem hard to optimize at first glance, but Tao is at the frontier of pushing AI towards these goals.

Therefore, as a 24-year-old young man, I recognize the unstoppable trend of AI in academic research, and have started utilizing AI in my latest research projects. I have reignited my academic passion and set one goal in my current academic route: I would like to publish at least 10 high-quality papers in the coming five years; 7 of them as first or co-first author, and 5 landing in middle-to-top venues. It’s going to get busy!

As for reflections, I do have plenty.

The first and foremost would be the lack of outlook. I still read too few books; I’ve gained a habit of recording books I want to read, and it has been accumulating into a gigantic list — maybe that is what actually discouraged me. But no, I should not find excuses. Anything can be tackled with effort; just like how a floor covered in water can be mopped up by sweeping with a squeegee and rinsing it, repeatedly for no more than 15 minutes (life experience), I can clear up the book list by reading books on a daily basis — just replace swiping through videos on the phone with reading books.

The next reflection would be that I really, really need to find a girlfriend. While I didn’t really care about this before, my parents have repeatedly reminded me of their wishes to see grandchildren. I love my parents, and to me, fulfilling their reasonable desires is naturally a duty of mine. That being said, I should really think about this more deeply. To have a girlfriend you have to actively seek one, instead of waiting. Man doesn’t age like fine wine.

…I can continue to find more shortcomings to reflect on, but this article has become very long, so I’ll halt here.

It was very rough at the beginning of 2026 when I was about to graduate and had sent numerous applications in hopes of an OPT and a reason to stay in the United States. Luckily I had friends and family who supported every decision I made, for which I am very grateful.

“Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.” (1 John 3:18)

Happy birthday, Quinn. Amen.

#Rant