“Some day we will build a thinking machine. It will be a truly intelligent machine. One that can see and hear and speak. A machine that will be proud of us.”
Ab Initio is the company that I work for. I started there in January of 2019. It is a very secretive place; there is almost no information about it available on the internet. Our customers like it this way, but it makes college recruiting a bit more challenging. It also makes writing this page more challenging. The information included here is only information that is already publicly available elsewhere on the internet.
Ab Initio means “From the Beginning” in Latin, and the broader intention of the name is something like “take the time to do things right from the beginning and you won’t have to do them again”. It is the successor corporation to the supercomputer manufacturer Thinking Machines, and it’s safe to say that the senior management learned lessons from that company. Unlike Thinking Machines, Ab Initio does not build custom hardware, but instead creates software that allows massively-parallel programs to be run on whatever hardware the customer wants to use. This has been commercially successful; Ab Initio survived the first dot-com bubble and continues to be stable as far as I can tell (though as a privately held company they make good use of their right to not tell us anything. We could be near bankruptcy for all I really know).
Until about five years ago Ab Initio only hired highly experienced candidates. There are now a small number of recent college graduates working there. It is an amazing place to learn; everyone I work with is extremely talented, highly experienced, and willing to take the time to share their knowledge with me. If you get a linkedin message from an Ab Initio recruiter, you should listen to what they have to say.
I work as a full-stack developer, crossing between our frontend and backend technologies. I enjoy this; I get to do the human-centered, visual work of interface design, but I also get to dig deeply and think really hard about algorithms. This responsibility also comes with a lot of something that I think of as “ambassador work”, which involves a lot of talking to people on other teams and negotiating. I also do a lot of interviewing for our college recruiting team. I have a patent pending for the first set of major features that I wrote, and I hope to achieve a second one for my work on Flows.