Hi! I'm Jake McLain.

I'm interested in exploring the role of AI in the human creative process.

I started Muse to pursue research and build products in this direction, beginning with applied AI tools for music production.

I'm a Pittsburgh native now living in San Francisco. I spend most of my time researching, programming, reading, writing, and playing music.

Before starting Muse, I was a Machine Learning Engineer at Govini, where I built data pipelines and ML analytics used by the US Department of Defense.

I originally studied Physics and Neuroscience (dual BSc.) with minors in Mathematics and Biomedical Engineering at Penn State.

My introduction to AI was through research at the intersection of deep learning and applied mathematics with the Jinchao Xu Group in 2020, where I developed a novel learning rate scheduler to optimize training runs of MgNet.

I love music, both consuming and creating. Muse initially grew out of my own needs when producing in Ableton Live. You can find what I've been listening to in my playlists section.

Recently my top hobbies (outside of building creative AI) have become meditation and reading philosophy. I spent some time learning Zen meditation at a zendo in southern Japan, and I'm catching up on the major works of Western philosophy in chronological order, and tracking my progress here.

I grew up playing ice hockey, and still am a die-hard Penguins fan.

I spent much of my high school and college years playing competitive video games, and peaked at top 500 in Overwatch. I don't play much now, but still think it was a valuable detour for cultivating a mindset for continuous improvement.

If you've made it this far, feel free to say hi!

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This is my digital bookshelf, which I keep updated to match my physical bookshelf. I mostly read classic literature, science, history, and philosophy.

I've marked the books I'm currently reading with green circles, and books I thought were particularly great with gold and silver stars. The links are auto generated from ISBNs pulled from goodreads, so a few might be broken.

WIP, check back soon

I write about my interests. Mostly AI research, science, philosophy, meditation, and music.

Pinned Post: Musings on Creative Machines

A deep dive into the advancements of AI and its implications for art and human creativity.