Ishan Bhat — San Jose, CA
Hi, I'm Ishan Bhat.
I train small language models, build retrieval and search systems, and stress-test whether research ideas deserve to become products. I care as much about what's happening inside a model as what it scores.
Work
- 2025 — now President @ One Sphere Array Inc. Current
- 2025 — now Digital Operations Coordinator @ Revive Body Current
- 2025 — now Digital Marketing Associate @ Revive Body Current
- 2024 Marketing Manager @ APEERS
- 2024 Graphic Design & Marketing Intern @ APEERS
- 2024 Social Media Manager @ Nexalux Foundation
- 2023 — 24 Project Intern @ Waste2Treasure Organization
Focus
aAI research
Training small language models from scratch, fine-tuning open-weight bases, and probing what models actually represent — concept and emotion probes, curiosity-like behavior, late-interaction retrieval, and state-space architectures. Internals over leaderboards.
bModel building
The unglamorous parts that decide everything: training infrastructure, hyperparameter sweeps, reading loss curves next to sample generations, and constructing synthetic datasets that keep their diversity instead of collapsing into one mode.
cSearch & knowledge
Semantic search, embeddings, and retrieval pipelines — plus a running obsession with a curiosity engine: expanding "people also ask"-style questions into an open-ended learning feed. Systems that make you explore, not just consume.
dSoftware & tooling
Developer tooling and the infrastructure underneath it: structured generation pipelines, TPU and SGLang deployments, DuckDB data work, and interfaces built on modern web stacks. Architecture and UX are the same concern, not two.
Contact
Let's get in touch.
If you're working on small models, retrieval, an AI-native product, or anything machine learning I'd love to connect with you!