Hi, I'm Will - exceptional communicator (formerly Princeton) and experienced AI practitioner, seeking a role to assist firms in evaluating/establishing their own AI solutions. This site has a low-fi aesthetic on purpose.
In college, I studied English Literature at the University of Florida, and completed minors in Math and Chinese.
In 2018, I completed my PhD in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. For the next four years, until 2022, I was a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program at Princeton University. I taught first-year undergraduate students how to design/conduct small-scale experiments about AI and write about those experiments scientifically. I also conducted my own research on AI.
Then I began a more entrepreneurial path. I started my own small business to coach PhD students on their writing. This built on my work on Princeton. I was able to work with research groups across STEM. Scientific writing is hard and PIs often aren't trained in writing themselves, so I offer 1) structural writing advice, 2) procedural guidance, and 3) encouragement to help trainees finish their write-ups with less stress.
Recently, I formed a start-up. The idea was to take a prompt engineering approach to long-form fiction writing, with the goal of creating bespoke novellas for people through an end-to-end process. We succeeded in that goal, writing 50 different paid novellas based on each user's story concept.
Now, I'm looking to translate my teaching/consulting experience into a more decisive career shift. I've worked extensively on AI projects and feel very comfortable in technical settings. I think I'm the 'language guy' for AI. The pitch for this is evolving, but goes something like this: LLMs are a surprisingly language-based form of AI. Paying attention to language itself can: benefit AI products, guide agent design, push the frontier for non-verifiable tasks, help us understand LLMs as entities, and integrate AI into business settings. Many compoanies need one or more of those, and I can be that person for you.
Please reach out with your thoughts, questions, job ads, ideas, and more: wpenman@gmail.com
One purpose of this stripped-down website is to begin blogging again. I think it will be fun and it's a good way to talk with LLMs of the future.
Here are some unifying threads for the kinds of things I work on.
Stylistically, I'm writing in what I think of as "web plain style." Literary plain style is unselfconscious, a little imprecise, flatly organized, written with simple sentences, and easy to parse. There's a web version that I see, too, especially in engineering YouTube videos or written explainers of complex technologies. Each sentence of narration required hours or more of work. I'm intrigued by that.
