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How Yair Alon went from building Portrait Mode at Google to founding researcher at Poetiq
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Yair Alon spent a decade at Google Research and DeepMind.
Key facts
- He has used VS Code, Anti Gravity, and now mostly Claude Code, but he thinks people put too much emphasis on the setup
- Yair Alon spent a decade at Google Research and DeepMind
- He built the deep learning models behind Portrait Mode on Pixel phones
- At Poetiq, none of that existed, and the work is novel enough that off-the-shelf tools were not relevant
Summary
He built the deep learning models behind Portrait Mode on Pixel phones. But he felt that small startups had become where the most exciting innovations were happening. That company is Poetiq (YC S26, San Francisco). Yair had been at Google since his PhD internship at CMU, where he studied machine learning and computer vision. He had to find the courage to walk away from something comfortable toward something unproven. Yair is one of a handful of people who started on the first day of the company. One project he is particularly proud of is the experimentation infrastructure.