LIVE FROM THE DESK · Almaty, KZ · UTC+5
00:00:00
/ Desk · 01
UNIT 001 · ALMATY · INDEPENDENT AI ENGINEER

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.

available for →
· AI engineering
· AI research collabs
· hackathon comrade
· network buddy
commissions open · Q2 '26
"the model
must speak
kazakh."
— working thesis
The bet: AI went enterprise. Billions in rounds, APIs you can't unplug, safety-by-committee. I build the other way — one person, a cheap machine, nights that don't pay, things that shouldn't work but do. Small open-weight models, squeezed hard. Kazakh first — because otherwise, nobody. Altair the computer was a kit you soldered. Altair the practice is the same idea, thirty years later, for models. Yours,
Kit · 1975 → 2026
— Altair
/ About · 02
[02]About / who’s typingone-person practice · almaty

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.

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.

/ spec-sheet
REC
Name
Altair Zhambyl — @kekeront
Education
Kazakh-British Technical University · Information Systems · 3rd yr
Base
Almaty, KZ — remote-friendly
Focus
LLMfine-tuning, RAG, QLoRA, Claude skills & agents
Also
CVLiDAR · lane detection · autonomous racing
Languages
Kazakh · Russian · English
Status
▮ commissions open · Q2 '26
Card · 01Now
What I'm working on
Qwen3-0.5B QLoRA runs on Kazakh corpora. Chasing KazMMLU. Writing Claude Code skills for the training loop so it babysits itself.
Card · 02Racing
Out on the track
LiDAR + CV perception for the Constructor University Autonomous Racing League — a racecar that stays inside the cones.
Card · 03Finalist
Decentrathon 5.0
Top 400 finalist out of 3000 teams. Built an AI admissions agent for Invision University — structured applicant scoring, RAG over policy docs, human in the loop.
Card · 04Reading
On my desk
QLoRA paper (again), recent RAG evals, anything about small-language finetunes, and Anthropic's docs on skills & agents.
/ Tapes · 03
[03]Selected builds · on tapeSide A

Three tapes I’ve recorded recently.

INSERT TAPE →
SIDE A · CH 03
ALTAIRVISION · KZ-9
VHS·REC— — : — —
INSERT TAPE
↓ pick a tape · watch it slide in ↓
↑ click a tape · it'll slide into the deck
/ Hobbies · 04
[04]Hobbies / what I'm playing & readingoff the clock

When I’m not fine-tuning, I’m exploring somewhere.

/ now playing · click a tape, it plays on screen
▶ NO SIGNAL
INSERT · VHS · TO · PLAY
SANYO · MONITOR · 14" · CRT
↑ click a tape · it plays on the monitor
/ current shelf · placeholder
1984
ORWELL
ANIMAL FARM
ORWELL
THE TIME MACHINE
H.G. WELLS
THE SIGN OF FOUR
CONAN DOYLE
MEDITATIONS
AURELIUS
THE PRAGMATIC PROGRAMMER
HUNT & THOMAS
DEEP LEARNING
GOODFELLOW
HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE
ADAMS
Orwell & Wells on the desk, Conan Doyle on the weekends, QLoRA paper bookmarked on the laptop.
/ Activity · 05
[05]Open-source · live from consolegithub.com/kekeront

Mostly shipping in public.

/ Contact · 06
[06]Transmit · Altair front panelserial ↔ ready

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.

GitHub@kekeront
LinkedIn/in/azhambyl
TimezoneUTC+5 · Almaty
Status▮ commissions open · Q2 '26
ALTAIR 8800CPU · 8080 · 2MHz
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▮ POWERSTATUS · READYLOAD · EXAMINE · DEPOSIT

Send a signal.

Pick a channel — message or meeting.

Via resend — altairzhambyl@gmail.com
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