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Nicholas Gates
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@ngates_

Nicholas Gates

@ngates_
Co-Founder / CTO @spiraldb | Creator of @vortexdotdev
London, England
nickgates.com
Joined February 2021
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  • @ngates_
    Nicholas Gates
    @ngates_
    14h
    This is exactly why Spiral is focusing on AI data infrastructure. Training on the right data is a surprisingly outsized lever
    @dwarkesh_sp
    Dwarkesh Patel
    @dwarkesh_sp
    Sep 8
    Pretraining progress seems to be coming mostly from data improvements. @who_is_jerbear and I pretrained combinations of year-representative open model recipes and data corpuses across 2019 to 2025 at various small scales. Data improvements contributed 3.24x as many compute
    Image
  • @ngates_
    Nicholas Gates
    @ngates_
    Sep 8
    You heard it here first folks - @vortexdotdev is the solution to the world's hardest problems
    @OpenAI
    OpenAI
    @OpenAI
    Sep 8
    Replying to @OpenAI
    The group produced an analytical proof and Lean formalization that via Navier-Stokes dynamics a fluid can develop a singularity in finite time. The solution is a vortex, a spinning swirl of fluid, that spirals inward and gets increasingly elongated, like spaghetti.
  • @ngates_
    Nicholas Gates
    @ngates_
    Aug 26
    I thought I'd test out my theory by vibe coding a Vortex plugin to read Parquet files... It works!
    Image
    @ngates_
    Nicholas Gates
    @ngates_
    Aug 14
    I’ve written enough file formats to know the bytes are the easy part. I/O, pruning, scheduling, pushdown eat the weekends. I built Vortex so I never have to do this again! spiraldb.com/blog/vortex-th…
    1
  • @ngates_
    Nicholas Gates
    @ngates_
    Aug 14
    I’ve written enough file formats to know the bytes are the easy part. I/O, pruning, scheduling, pushdown eat the weekends. I built Vortex so I never have to do this again!
    Blog post cover
    Vortex: The Storage Layer for the Composable Data Stack
    From spiraldb.com
    4
  • @ngates_
    Nicholas Gates
    @ngates_
    Aug 13
    Four innocent lines of PyTorch hide a video preprocessing footgun. In our H100 benchmark, the resulting physical plan made the model’s first operator run 8.9× slower. The code is clean. The physical plan isn’t. 🧵
    1
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