Hi, I’m Deepak Bhat, currently an AI Engineer at EXLS, working somewhere in the broad and increasingly blurry intersection of data, machine learning, AI and technology.

My formal education doesn’t exactly point in that direction. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from RVCE,Bangalore. At some point during college, I decided that learning about engines and machines wasn’t quite enough, and started getting interested in computers and programming. That eventually turned into machine learning, which turned into a career, and here I am.

I’ve always been curious about how things work. I like taking things apart, understanding what is happening underneath, and then trying to build something myself. This applies to machines, software, businesses, financial markets and, unfortunately, occasionally things around the house that probably should have been left alone.

I spent the early years working with machine learning and data, and over the last few years my attention has increasingly moved towards AI. The field is moving ridiculously fast, which is both exciting and slightly exhausting. Just when you think you’ve understood something, there is a new model, framework, architecture or acronym that everyone on Twitter seems to have been using for six months.

I’m interested in the technology, but probably more interested in what sits underneath the hype. I like understanding why something works, where it breaks, what the trade-offs are, and whether it actually makes sense to use it in the first place. I’m particularly fascinated by the gap between an impressive prototype and a system that can survive contact with the real world.

I have a reasonably strong bias toward fundamentals. Tools change. Frameworks come and go. Today’s fashionable architecture becomes tomorrow’s legacy system with surprising speed. The underlying problems—data quality, system design, latency, reliability, cost, incentives, human behaviour—tend to stick around.

That doesn’t mean I’m against shiny new technology. Quite the opposite. I’m usually one of the people playing with it early. I just have a habit of eventually asking, “Okay, but what is this actually useful for?”

Sometimes the answer is genuinely interesting. Sometimes it’s a three-hour experiment that proves something could be built, followed by the slightly less exciting realisation that it probably shouldn’t be.

This website is basically where I dump my thoughts.

I don’t have a particularly elaborate content strategy for it. Think of it as a personal journal that happens to be public. I’ll write about things I’m learning, things I’m building, things I disagree with, things I find interesting and ideas that have been occupying too much space in my head. Some of it will be technical. Some of it won’t.

Hopefully, writing things down will also force me to think more clearly. There is a big difference between feeling like you understand something and trying to explain it well enough that another person can understand it too. I’ve discovered this the hard way.

Outside of work and technology, I’m fairly predictable in some ways and completely inconsistent in others. I play a lot of video games when I get the time. Age of Empires and Far Cry are probably my two favourites, which means I can happily spend an evening either building an economy from scratch or running around shooting people in increasingly ridiculous locations. I’m not sure what that says about me.

I follow cricket quite closely and am a fairly unapologetic Virat Kohli fan. I also follow Formula 1 and support Max Verstappen. We even share a birthday, which I consider compelling evidence that I chose the correct driver to support. Max, as far as I know, has not commented on this coincidence.

I’m also interested in investing and have been taking a long-term approach to investing in both Indian and US markets. I enjoy studying businesses almost as much as studying technology. Understanding why a company makes money, what gives it an advantage, how management thinks and whether that advantage can survive ten or twenty years is a surprisingly good way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

There are probably connections between all of these interests. I like systems. I like competition. I like understanding why some things work and others don’t. I like learning enough about something to form my own opinion rather than simply adopting the prevailing one.

I also change my mind.

That’s something I’ve become more comfortable with over time. I don’t think having strong opinions means being permanently attached to them. In fact, I’d rather have a strong opinion, test it against reality, discover that I was wrong and change it than have no opinion at all.

So that’s probably enough about me for an introduction.

I’ll leave the résumé-style stuff to [LINK TO LINKEDIN / RESUME]. This is the place for the things that don’t fit neatly into a résumé: the rabbit holes, the experiments, the technical obsessions, the half-formed ideas that become interesting after thinking about them for a while, and the occasional completely unrelated thought that somehow seemed worth writing down.

Consider this my corner of the internet.

Make yourself comfortable.