My New Role as Director of AI & Research at Document Crunch
By Quentin Davis, Director of AI & Research, Document Crunch
I am excited to announce my transition to Document Crunch’s Director of AI & Research.
In my newly appointed role, I will oversee our AI & Research initiatives, a job I’ve been doing on a smaller scale since joining Document Crunch in May of 2022 as Principal Software Engineer, but now is the time, after our recent Series B funding, to accelerate innovation, build a world-class team, and increase our capacity to meet the challenges ahead.
I am honored to take on this new role, to expand our team, and to invest in solving the complex, high-impact research problems that have been on our radar. With this dedicated focus, we can deepen our capabilities, drive innovation for our company, and deliver even greater value to our customers.
My Motivation
I have been inspired by the potential of AI far longer than most who know me realize.
I began to believe in the power of AI during the time many now refer to as an AI Winter, a time when there were few breakthroughs and funding for ambitious projects had dried up. This was before IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in chess. This was a time when neural networks were considered by many to be a dead end. It was well before specialized GPUs made modern day LLMs possible. Maybe it's because I was in college at the time, but it was during an AI winter that I began to believe.
I started college to become an artist, but my true love was science. So, inevitably, I finished college with a degree in Physics. Like many would-be-physicists, I took the next step and went to graduate school to study Astrophysics. It was in graduate school that I dove deeper into computer science alongside my studies. I started programming part-time while taking classes during the day. Taking notes during class one evening, I had the profound and unshakeable personal realization that AI would be used to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. I was so convinced that I left grad school to pursue building software full time, and I believed quite deeply that AI was going to change the world during my lifetime.
We are now seeing this unfold in real-time every day. We have arrived at what many people believe is a historic period in the advancement of artificial intelligence. Whether you believe true artificial general intelligence (AGI) is next year or next decade, it is increasingly undeniable to believe it is possible.
The Document Crunch Experience
To best explain what it feels like to be part of the Document Crunch team and what makes being a part of it so special, I’ll share a story I told internally at the company some time ago.
I've worked from home for several years, which means my kids have overheard my video calls at prior companies. They've also overheard my video calls with Document Crunch, and my daughter made a very wonderful observation. She said, "Dad, you used to sound like you were always having boring work meetings, but now you always sound like you are just having fun and talking with friends. Are you not doing work calls anymore?" I laughed and said the calls she heard were work calls. I explained to her the difference was the people.
Our team follows the lead of our CEO, Josh Levy, in living our core values. My favorite of which is being warm hearted. It means we have set a high standard for ourselves, that we want to be not just smart, hard-working individuals, but great people in general.
Where We are Going
The impact of AI on every facet of the work we do is only just beginning.
The capabilities and use cases unlocked by models, large and small, and of different modalities (text + vision + voice), are growing every single day. Our goal is to lead the way in the future we are all living in now. We are growing a team to help research and build what used to be considered impossible.
We are looking for those who dream of doing the impossible.