Welcome
My name is Jonathan Alexander Politzki. I grew up in the NW suburbs of Chicago. I studied finance with a minor in engineering at the University of Illinois, where I fell in love with technology and I founded my first “startups” (Quant, Nephra). After university, I started my career in investment banking at Leerink Partners in NYC, then worked at Shaper Capital, and now work on AI, which I consider my main area of expertise. Many textbooks, projects, and products later, I consider myself more of an engineer than anything else.
I believe human focus is the most misallocated resource on earth, and that we can use AI to elevate ourselves and save people from repetitive and boring work. Most of this technology is already here but it is just not evenly distributed yet. One vector of progress I am focused on is simply helping companies absorb this technology.
I also believe the arrival of computers that understand humans will be the most important technology of my lifetime and perhaps my life's work. This is what we are building at Jean. In this vein, my interests center on how computers understand and represent humans: representation learning, contrastive learning, AI memory, context engineering, embedding systems, user models, and emotion vectors. Most of them sprung out of my original essay, General Personal Embeddings.
Guiding quotes
“What are the important problems of your field, and why aren't you working on them?”
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” (Hat man sein wofür des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie.)
“He who strives and lives to strive, can earn redemption still.” (Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen.)
“Only he who is constantly changing is my kin.” (Nur wer sich wandelt, bleibt mit mir verwandt.)