iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Janu Verma @januverma.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Been thinking about the trends at the intersection of AI and RecSys. Where are we heading. Based on my own work, extensive research, and lots of analysis/thinking, I have put together my thoughts in a detailed article on substack. Link: open.substack.com/pub/januverm...

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Janu Verma @januverma.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

There is a specific kind of friction that hits on January 1st. I call it "Cold Shyness." It’s that reluctance to be out there—whether physically in the cold or metaphorically in a new skill—exposed and uncomfortable.

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Janu Verma @januverma.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

Add. Related. Context. Often, the most significant performance gains come from enriching models with related, contextual info. Models get better by being exposed to auxiliary signals that deepen their understanding of the task.

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Janu Verma @januverma.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

My latest blog post dives into the protein folding problem - a fundamental question in molecular biology that puzzled scientists for decades, until deep learning models like AlphaFold changed the game. I walk through the biological and computational roots of the problem.

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Janu Verma @januverma.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Recently, I’ve been exploring the potential of LLMs for recommendation tasks. Sharing the first report of my project where I experiment with the ability of Llama 1B model to understand user preferences from their past behavior. open.substack.com/pub/januverm...

open.substack.com

Large Language Models for Recommender Systems

Can LLMs reason over user behaviour data to decipher preferences?

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Janu Verma @januverma.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Have we swapped “reasoning” for “agentic” as the new shibboleth

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Janu Verma @januverma.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Just came back after a month in India, no-laptop family time. Any tips on how to motivate myself to do any work are highly appreciated 🙏

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Reposted by Janu Verma

Johanna Franklin @johannamath.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

The queen of examples and counterexamples!

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Reposted by Janu Verma

Thomas Wolf @thomwolf.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

The FineWeb team is happy to finally release "FineWeb2" 🥂🥳 FineWeb 2 extends the data driven approach to pre-training dataset design that was introduced in FineWeb 1 to now covers 1893 languages/scripts Details: huggingface.co/datasets/Hug... A detailed open-science tech report is coming soon

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Janu Verma @januverma.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Nothing like waking up to see your models training in a nice way. #neuralnets

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Reposted by Janu Verma

Yoav Artzi @yoavartzi.com · 02/12/2024

I am seriously behind uploading Learning Machines videos, but I did want to get @jonathanberant.bsky.social's out sooner than later. It's not only a great talk, it also gives a remarkably broad overview and contextualization, so it's an excellent way to ramp up on post-training youtu.be/2AthqCX3h8U

youtu.be

Jonathan Berant (Tel Aviv University / Google) / Towards Robust Language Model Post-training

YouTube video by Yoav Artzi

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Reposted by Janu Verma

Alexander Doria @dorialexander.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Won’t help with my reputation but since I worked on social network analysis/regulation: if Bluesky ever is a success, they are extremely likely to retrain AI models (not necessarily LLM) on user data.

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Janu Verma @januverma.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

If you are trying to fine-tune (instruction sft) a LLM for a specific task, how much should you work on refining the prompt? The general alpaca format seem suboptimal and far from how we use these models.

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