About

Whats up!

I’m Chris, an applied scientist at Wafer Systems developing multimodal action models in an effort to help create the “self-driving phone”. I was born and raised in Chicago and am currently in San Francisco.

My work for the past few years has revolved primarily around training language models for agential applications, some specific tasks being code generation, function calling and device manipulation. I am interested in reasoning, particularly the question:

How in the heck can we get language models to “actually” reason?

Generally, I would like to explore topics in deep learning related to:

  • the optimization dynamics of neural networks
  • architectures for reasoning
  • representation learning
  • creative applications of machine intelligence

I believe that the architectures and systems of today, whilst brilliant and magical in their own regard, are leaps and bounds away from the “endgame” of artificial intelligence. I would wager we likely have yet another “winter” in the field of machine learning before we hit “the main summer”.

As such, I intend to help bring about that summer through a PhD – I am looking for labs to work with in 2025 and for PhD programs to join in Fall of 2026.

Additionally, we are looking for collaborators at Wafer – if you would like to help make “the siri that should have been” then lets chat!

tiny-heater
A tiny "heater" in the studio
Image Description Image Description

A wild HHKB and Silent Princess inhabit a desk



As one should not think twice about an opportunity, one shouldn’t hesitate to write down a good quote when you find it – here is one I had the pleasure of coming about recently:

“Style’s the hardest thing to get, and it’s not something you really strive for. I’m sure that Miles never really strived to be a stylist. He just strived to be himself, to learn, to develop, and to express a strong, independent personality. And at the end of it, it had an identity and that’s why he’s a stylist. But somebody might say, ’Wow, I could be a stylist by just reaching out and being strange.’ or reaching out and being different, or novel, and of course that’s a mistake.”

     Bill Evans



If you actually read this far, you are awesome – say hello!

(i.e; ckgresla at gmail dot com)



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