Hi, I am Zhu Liang.

## Early life and Education

I am 32 years old as of April 2025. I was born in China, and I moved to Singapore at the age of 15 in 2008 on a scholarship program. I have since been studying and living in Singapore.

I studied Computer Science in NUS for undergraduate degree from 2013 to 2017, where I learnt AI, machine learning and reinforcement learning.

## Work Experience

I worked at Grab and Ant Group for 5 years as a software engineer from 2017 to 2022. Tech stack used in Grab includes React, Ruby on Rails and golang. I had experience managing the web apps as a monorepo using lerna, as well as setting up CI/CD pipeline for web apps in Grab using Ansible, Jenkins and Groovy scripts on AWS.

In Ant, I have experience leading a team of 10 software engineers across timezones. I've built several high-profile projects such as consumer web checkout for Alipay+, Mini program development portal and key modules like cashier, checkout and top-up for commercial e-wallet solutions.

The tech stack is mainly React and Vue for frontend, and internal Node.js based framework for backend. I have consistently gotten exceeds expectations in performance reviews and the last key project I worked on was delivered ahead of schedule.

## Solo Founder Experience

I start [AI Simulator](https://ai-simulator.com/) as a sole proprietorship in 2022 after I left my job at Ant Group to pursue entrepreneurship. I built a series of AI Simulator games in 2022 and 2023, where players can use AI to play puzzle games like 2024, snake and block puzzle on their mobile phone.

It also allows players to train and run popular RL models like DQN and PPO on their mobile phone. I believe I'm the first person to make the PPO training work on mobile phones.

The tech stack is mainly React Native, Expo and tensorflow.js. I also submitted and merged [3 pull requests](https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/commits?author=paradite) to the tensorflow.js repo to fix some issues.

At end of 2023, I have [replicated GPT-2 results](https://16x.engineer/2023/12/29/nanoGPT-azure-T4-ubuntu-guide.html) myself by running nanoGPT on an Azure instance.

I built [16x Prompt](https://prompt.16x.engineer/) in September 2023, an desktop GUI application that streamlines AI coding workflow. The app is built in Electron.js and Vue.js. The project is live and I have been shipping updates and improvements regularly.

By April 2025, I have 7000+ users, more than 500 paid customers (who bought the lifetime license), and made 15k SGD in lifetime sale.

I started building a new desktop app called [16x Eval](https://eval.16x.engineer/) in March 2025. The app aims to be the central workspace for AI developers to evaluate prompts and models.

## Consulting and Writing Experience

I have been consulting for several smaller companies and startups in 2024 as fractional CTO and consultation, helping them build software and AI solutions.

I started posting on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhu-liang/) regularly around 2023 and have grown my audience on LinkedIn to over 10,000 followers in March 2025, thanks to a few viral posts on topics such as frontend, software engineering and AI. I am part of the LinkedIn Top Voices program, an invitation-only group of experts across the professional world.

I recently started a newsletter [The Ground Truth](https://thegroundtruth.substack.com/) to write longer piece of content on AI.