bio.

My name is Tobias. I grew up in the center of Shanghai and became a real city boy, though my parents were from the countryside. Two years before I was born, they came to the city to open a bookstore about design. I grew up in that environment — spending a lot of time in the bookstore — and developed a passion for creating human-centered design and experiences.

In fall 2021, I came to Tufts University in the Boston area to study computer science, but I also became really interested in philosophy and literature. I took several classes in political theory and found myself intrigued by Hegel, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, and the questions they posed.

In 2023, I started learning iOS development because I wanted to create a social media app of my own — Karma Farm. That project never came to fruition, but I learned a lot by building my own projects and learning from mentors in the industry. I met Zev Eisenberg, a staff engineer at The New York Times, and we later became close friends. He taught me a great deal about software engineering, and helped me develop my first mobile app, Write It Down — a note-taking app with some special features.

In early 2024, I became intrigued by the capabilities of ChatGPT and started studying the Transformer architecture and the inner workings of large language models under the guidance of Peter Nadel, an NLP specialist at the Tufts Tisch Data Lab. That led to interpretability research on whether LLMs can be steered toward responses that are more meaningful for mental health — work that became Vitals.

After college, I travelled a bit around the world — England, France, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii — working on farms through WWOOF, a nonprofit that connects volunteers with organic farms. I kept working on my software projects the whole way, from wherever I happened to be staying.

In May 2026, I moved to San Francisco and started working on a social media app with Lawrence Liang, a tech entrepreneur. I plan to make San Francisco my home for now, and to keep growing from here.