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The Artificial Engineer The Artificial Engineer Contact
For Everyone · September 2, 2025

Why I Started The Artificial Engineer

A two-track ML blog: reproducible engineering deep dives for practitioners, and clear explainers for everyone.

By Rafael Mosquera

The Problem

After my 23rd attempt at debugging an inference pipeline at 2 AM on a Sunday, I realized most ML tutorials end exactly where real problems begin.

My Path Here

I didn’t come from a traditional CS background — I studied economics and law. But curiosity (and a lot of debugging in PyTorch) led me into machine learning.

Over the last 5+ years, I’ve worked on:

  • Evaluation frameworks such as Dynabench.
  • Large-scale datasets such as People’s Speech and Adversarial Nibbler.
  • Coauthoring and publishing at top conferences:
    • HelpMed, at Nature Medicine 2026.
    • Constrained Wikigame, at the Reasoniing LLMs Workshop at ICLR 2026.
    • Unsupervised Speech in The Wild Challenge,
    • Best paper award at NeurIPS D&B 2024 with The Prism Alignment Dataset.
    • BabyLM at CoNLL (ACL) 2023.
    • DataPerf at NeurIPS 2023.
  • Competitions every now and then, such as PatentBot.

Through this work, I noticed a consistent pattern: the gap between research papers and production reality is bigger than anyone admits.

  • Technical content: often too dense for anyone outside the research bubble.
  • Popular ML content: often oversimplified to the point of being misleading.
  • Bridges between the two: almost nonexistent.

That’s the problem this blog tries to solve.

Two Tracks, One Mission

This blog runs on two parallel tracks — each aimed at closing the gap between research depth and real-world clarity.

For Engineers

Deep technical dives, reproducible experiments, and hard-won lessons from production. Sample posts:

  • Why our LangChain pipeline breaks when trying to customize it
  • Scaling inference when GPUs are scarce (and expensive)
  • Fine-tuning small LLMs for common use cases — a cheaper path than you think
  • Building a production-ready ASR pipeline: from VAD to deployment

For Everyone

Clear, accessible explainers of how ML shapes daily life — no PhD required, no jargon walls. Sample posts:

  • Why LLMs hallucinate (and why it matters in practice)
  • Getting more out of your AI assistant without burning tokens
  • Tips for better image generations with today’s generative models
  • How recommendation systems really guess your taste

Why “The Artificial Engineer”?

I’m not a “real” engineer by degree, but I’ve spent some time making AI systems work in the real world. The name captures the irony: someone artificial (by training) engineering artificial intelligence.

Join the Conversation

I’ll be posting often, hopefully. But I want this to be a dialogue, not a broadcast.

Tagged #ml-engineering #reproducibility #learning-in-public

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Learn, build, share

Writing at the seam between research and production.

Immerse yourself in the in-between space where papers become systems. Two parallel tracks for two kinds of readers. Pick the one that speaks to you.