Hello Axelera Community!
My name is Ioannis and I am a part-time working student here. Before moving to the Netherlands to start my Master's studies, I was researching potential companies to intern with, and Axelera was a name that really stood out. When I attended a presentation by the company during my Master's kick-off events and heard they were looking for working students, it felt like the perfect opportunity!
I officially joined in December and have been working with the Metis AIPU on the Lenovo P3 Tiny and an OrangePI since then. Over the last couple of months, I have worked on a variety of scenarios, starting from simply deploying models to building a mini demo that combines Whisper, LLaMA, and a text-to-speech model. I have also been documenting my experience along the way, testing the Voyager SDK documentation and evaluating how intuitive and user-friendly it feels for a newcomer.
When it came to learning the new hardware and software, the guides were very helpful. However, I found that the most important key to my learning was experimenting beyond what was suggested in the guides to get a deeper understanding of what is actually happening.
Before joining Axelera, I was quite an outsider to the world of edge AI and hardware accelerators. Also, because my previous work experience was at a much smaller startup, I didn't know exactly what to expect moving to a larger company, but I can definitely say I have been positively surprised. Being able to experiment with Metis has been a really exciting experience.
Overall, I am very happy with my journey so far. In fact, now that I’ve learned how to use the hardware and SDK, I am actually thinking of purchasing a Metis for myself, as I have some personal projects it would work very well with. I am looking forward to interacting with Metis and Voyager even more!
