Building small, fast, and
Kazakh
I'm Altair — an independent AI engineer running a one-person practice out of Almaty. I fine-tune open-weight models for the languages the frontier skipped, wire agents that don't pretend, and put perception systems on racecars. Current obsession: making models speak Kazakh.
must speak
kazakh."
I run a one-person AI practice out of Almaty. The work is narrow on purpose: small open-weight models squeezed for the languages and domains the frontier skipped — Kazakh first — with agents, retrieval stacks, and perception systems built around them.
Recent shipping: a production-style memory service (FastAPI · Postgres/pgvector · hybrid retrieval fused with RRF), a multi-agent X/Twitter pipeline with spend caps and eval gates, and QymyzLM — a sub-1B Kazakh model benchmarked across 9,870 KazMMLU questions.
How I work: short, fixed-scope engagements · written evals before shipping · code you can actually read. No cargo-cult agents, no frontier-API dependency you can't unplug, no "we'll see how it goes" pricing.
Off the desk: bass-heavy playlists, long walks around Almaty, cassettes I can't actually play, and the occasional racecar.
Three tapes I’ve recorded recently.
FastAPI + Postgres/pgvector recall service — typed memory extraction, hybrid cosine + full-text retrieval fused with RRF, canonical-slot supersession, graceful degradation. Built for an AI-engineering challenge.
Multi-agent compose pipeline — outliner → writer → editor → evaluator → fact-checker — with spend-cap gating, voice-profile fingerprinting, web-search grounding, and full token/cost traces.
Sub-1B Kazakh LLM on Qwen3-0.6B via QLoRA — benchmarked across 9,870 KazMMLU questions, chasing the 8B Sherkala-Chat. Fine-tunes beat from-scratch Kazakh models.
Robotek Grand Tournament — first international online digital scoring & live-leaderboard platform in Central Asia, built for the 2026 robotics championship.
Image-driven clothing search — match a garment from a photo or query against a catalog. In progress.
PROTOCOL 48 — a typing-horror web game where a typo pulls the trigger. nFactorial AI Cup 2026: 9th of 70.
When I’m not fine-tuning, I’m exploring somewhere.
Mostly shipping in public.
Some of it came back with a medal.
Three-time national gold (1st place), then twice through to the world finals against the best junior teams on the planet.
Advanced to the regional quarterfinals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest — awarded a 3rd-degree honor.
Podium finish at the Roboland robotics championship — third place overall.
“PROTOCOL 48” — a typing-horror web game where a single typo pulls the trigger. Built and shipped during the 2026 AI game jam.
“X-Day” — a top-down pixel stealth game in Pygame: smuggle a cake through a school past laser-sighted hall monitors.
Let's talk.
Send a note through the panel — it goes through Resend to my inbox. Or pick a 30-min slot on the other tab and it lands on my Google Calendar. I usually reply within a day.
Send a signal.
Pick a channel — message or meeting.