In the summer of 2021, I got an email that would change my life. I’d been attending the UCLA math circle for almost a decade at that point, and I had a good relationship with the head of the program, Prof. Oleg Gleizer. But I was surprised when he sent me an email saying, “We may have a research opportunity at USC this Summer.” Prof. Salman Avestimehr of USC (University of Southern California) was doing research into distributed machine learning techniques, and he had reached out to Prof. Gleizer looking for mathematically advanced high school students for an eight-week apprenticeship … At the time I knew very little about the inner workings of artificial intelligence, and nothing about any of the subjects Prof. Avestimehr was researching. But I’d been interested in AI for a long while and loved seeing all the new technologies being created. This was when GPT-3 had just been released, and ChatGPT was more than a year away, so the available software was very basic by today’s standards: one AI could write classical music, another could replace the background of a video, another could generate realistic faces.

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• Mathematics