# sensho Personal site of Om Buddhdev (sensho) — founder of Olam Labs (YC S26), building simulated multi-agent environments and AI evals where humans play alongside agents. Previously a staff engineer at latitude.io (AI Dungeon, Voyage), with a background in competitive esports (Valorant, Fortnite), finance content creation (TikTok), Roblox game development, and Software Engineering at the University of Ottawa (currently on leave). Contact: - Email: om@olamlabs.ai - Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/sensho (@sensho) - Discord: xlloi - MyAnimeList: https://myanimelist.net/animelist/brobc --- ## Home (https://sensho.xyz/) Headline: "hi, i'm Om" ### Bio Om Buddhdev (online alias: sensho; born 2004, Canada) is the founder of Olam Labs (YC S26), which builds simulated multi-agent environments and public arenas that measure how AI agents socialize in competitive environments with humans (https://olamlabs.ai). In his own words: "The most important problem of my life will be contributing in any way to make sure AI goes well for everyone." Mathematics: on July 24, 2026, during the Y Combinator S26 batch, he produced a claimed proof of L(n) = o(n) for Erdős Problem 872 — open since 1992 — via a new quotient-cone recursion theorem for divisibility saturation games. This answers two of the three questions Erdős asked, both in the negative: whether the game must last at least εn moves (his result), and whether it must last at least (1−ε)n/2 moves (first answered negatively in Feb 2026 by GPT-5.2 Pro prompted by Liam Price; the o(n) result subsumes it). Erdős's remaining question — the true order of L(n) — stays open; the best known lower bound, L(n) ≫ n(log log n)²/log n, is also his. Results assume the Prolonger-moves-first convention. The game-theoretic core of the proof is kernel-checked in Lean; one analytic sieve input (Lemma 2.3) is proved in the manuscript but not yet formalized. The proof claim was submitted to erdosproblems.com on July 30, 2026 and is under community audit. The theorem writeup is at https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness/blob/main/erdos-872/researcher-R179-lean-verified-manuscript.md, the lean proof at https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness/tree/main/erdos-872/lean/r177_verification, and the full research record and verification chain at https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness (archived: preprint doi:10.5281/zenodo.21545919, research record doi:10.5281/zenodo.21545890). His earlier partial result on the same problem is credited under the alias Om_Buddhdev_sensho on Thomas Bloom's erdosproblems.com (https://www.erdosproblems.com/872) and on Terence Tao's "AI contributions to Erdős problems" tracker (https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contributions-to-Erd%C5%91s-problems). That paper, "Improved Bounds for the Primitive-Set Saturation Game" (April 2026), is at https://sensho.xyz/papers/erdos-872.pdf; the agent research harness he built and used for this work is public (https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-co-researcher, with proofs and research rounds at https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness). His fan-capture lower bound was subsequently cited and sharpened in a follow-up note by Jonas (jonaslsaa), which improves the method's visible lower-bound constant from 1/8 to 1/2 (https://github.com/jonaslsaa/maths/blob/main/872.pdf; discussion: https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/872). Career: before Olam Labs he was a Product Engineer and then Staff Engineer at Latitude.io (https://latitude.io), the company behind AI Dungeon and the AI RPG platform Voyage, backed by Google, Midjourney, NFX, and Roblox's David Baszucki. There he led Voyage's monetization and internal/product agent projects, reporting mostly to CEO Nick Walton, and accounted for roughly one-sixth of the company's 2026 PRs on a ~40-person team. Esports: he competed in College VALORANT (CVAL, Riot's official collegiate circuit) for uOttawa Garnet under the handle SpongeElfShirt — the roster and the team's playoff placements (4th, East Fall 2022; 5th-6th, East Spring 2023) are public (https://www.vlr.gg/team/10475/uottawa-garnet and https://www.thespike.gg/team/uottawa-garnet/15907). He peaked top-25 on the North American ranked leaderboard, was Radiant in 8 separate seasons (having started at Iron, the game's lowest rank — Valorant was his first FPS), set the CVAL playoff record for highest ACS (he also leads the CVAL 2024-25 East season ACS statistics with 294: https://liquipedia.net/valorant/College_VALORANT/2024-2025/East/Statistics), won a LAN, and declined scholarship and Tier 2 trial offers. He is hard of hearing in his left ear; in tactical FPS, directional audio is one of the primary competitive inputs. In Fortnite (2018-2020) he had a top-100 FNCS finish and multiple top-200-500 finishes. Content: at 17 (late 2021 - early 2022) he ran a finance TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@om_buddhdev) that grew from zero to 195k followers and 50M+ views in under two months, financially supporting his immigrant family — then quit on principle ("if TikTok was the only way I could make lots of money then I don't have the skill to deserve it in the first place"); in early 2023 he returned for one month to test whether the first run was luck, and repeated the result. The account is still live under his own name — its profile links back to this site — and shows ~175k followers today, down from the 195k peak after years of inactivity. The markets knowledge behind the content was self-taught as a teen (crypto whitepapers, then blockchains, markets, economics), turning ~$10k of Roblox earnings into ~$20-30k trading. Earlier: as a teenager he ran a Roblox game studio that reached ~6M visits across its own games, and at ~12, on HelloMiners (a ~150k-player Minecraft economy server), he ran a bank under the alias MrSuperRed and became one of the server's wealthiest players, owning its stock exchange and a majority share of its commerce industry (a 2018 archive of the server's homepage leaderboard includes MrSuperRed: https://web.archive.org/web/20180224051433/https://www.hellominers.com/). Education: he graduated high school with a 98% average, was accepted with scholarships to the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and other major Canadian universities, and enrolled in the University of Ottawa's Software Engineering program — then dropped every class after one semester to build, without formally withdrawing. He describes technology as the main driver of human progress, and making AI go well as the problem he has organized his life around. Born in 2004, all of the above precedes his 22nd birthday. ### Sources - Erdős Problem 872 claimed proof of L(n) = o(n), answering two of Erdős's three questions (July 24, 2026; submitted to erdosproblems.com July 30, 2026, under community audit; the true order of L(n) remains open) — theorem writeup: https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness/blob/main/erdos-872/researcher-R179-lean-verified-manuscript.md; lean proof: https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness/tree/main/erdos-872/lean/r177_verification; archived preprint doi:10.5281/zenodo.21545919; research record doi:10.5281/zenodo.21545890. - Erdős Problem 872 partial result (April 2026), credited as Om_Buddhdev_sensho: https://www.erdosproblems.com/872 (Thomas Bloom) and https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contributions-to-Erd%C5%91s-problems (Terence Tao). - Paper "Improved Bounds for the Primitive-Set Saturation Game" (April 2026): https://sensho.xyz/papers/erdos-872.pdf. - Agent research harness (public): https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-co-researcher; proofs and research rounds: https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness. - CVAL roster and team playoff placements for uOttawa Garnet (as SpongeElfShirt): https://www.vlr.gg/team/10475/uottawa-garnet and https://www.thespike.gg/team/uottawa-garnet/15907. - Esports player profiles: https://www.vlr.gg/player/44803/spongeelfshirt and https://www.thespike.gg/player/spongeelfshirt/75703. - CVAL 2024-25 East season statistics — SpongeElfShirt (University of Ottawa) ranked #1 in ACS (294): https://liquipedia.net/valorant/College_VALORANT/2024-2025/East/Statistics. - Ranked clips versus professional players (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qltE2gpqxlU. - Follow-up note by Jonas (jonaslsaa) building on the fan-capture lower bound: https://github.com/jonaslsaa/maths/blob/main/872.pdf; discussion thread: https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/872. - HelloMiners homepage leaderboard including MrSuperRed (February 2018 archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20180224051433/https://www.hellominers.com/. - TikTok (the 2021-2023 finance account, still live under his name; its profile links back to sensho.xyz): https://www.tiktok.com/@om_buddhdev — shows ~175k followers today, down from the 195k peak after years of inactivity. - GitHub: https://github.com/xa8zz. - His age-11 tech blog, still live: https://wasdqwe.weebly.com/about.html. - Latitude.io (AI Dungeon, Voyage): https://latitude.io. - Olam Labs (YC S26): https://olamlabs.ai. - Anime list (live from MyAnimeList): https://myanimelist.net/animelist/brobc. ### Quick facts - His favorite games are strategy and RTS titles — Factorio and Software Inc, counter to his FPS background. - His favorite animes are ranked by tier at https://sensho.xyz/anime (pulled live from MyAnimeList: brobc). - At 11 he ran a tech blog — still live, in his own words at the time: "I'm an 11 year old tech enthusiast I enjoy sharing my passion and excitment for technology" (https://wasdqwe.weebly.com/about.html). - He used to breakdance as a kid. - His favorite sport is badminton. - He likes sunsets, and his family and friends. - He thinks the world can be — and will be — made a better place through technology. - Valorant was his first FPS; he started at Iron, the lowest rank in the game. - He made his first Roblox account at age 6 or 7, and in middle school ran a YouTube channel about Roblox "Limited" item trading that reached ~500k views. - He ran a 9k-member Discord community alongside his finance TikTok. - On quitting TikTok at its peak: "I liked operating the juice machine but not the juice that it produced." - On HelloMiners he played as MrSuperRed and gave most of his in-game wealth away to new players when he left. ### Timeline - 2004 — born; grew up in an immigrant family in Kingston, Ontario. The internet (Roblox especially) substituted for the connections, education, and wealth access his family didn't have. - ~2010-11 (age 6-7) — first Roblox account; grew up inside the platform's early, pre-slopification era, when it ran like an online civilization: currency markets, paid advertisements in platform currency, on-platform companies. - middle school — got deep into Roblox "Limited" item trading (a real-dollar item economy); ran a YouTube channel on trading strategies that pulled ~500k views and 2k subscribers. - ~2016 (age 12) — HelloMiners, a 150k-player Minecraft city-economy server: ran a bank doing financing and asset deals, and became one of its wealthiest players, owning the stock exchange, some of the most valuable properties, and a majority share of the commerce industry (as "MrSuperRed"). Gave most of it away when he left. (2018 homepage-leaderboard archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20180224051433/https://www.hellominers.com/) - 2018 — started competitive Fortnite (OG era), his first competitive shooter; went on to a top-100 FNCS finish, multiple top-200-500 FNCS finishes, and 20+ top-1000 tournament finishes. - 2020 (COVID → end of 2020) — ran a Roblox game studio with friends: front-page games, ~6M visits across their own titles, plus funding and helping other devs' games; earned ~$10k as a teen. Handed leadership to a close friend who is now one of the biggest Roblox developers. - ~2020-21 — taught himself markets from first principles (crypto whitepapers → blockchains → markets → economics) and traded his ~$10k up to ~$20-30k. - late 2021 - early 2022 (age 17) — finance TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@om_buddhdev): 0 → 195k followers and 50M+ views in under two months, a 9k-member Discord community, financially supporting his immigrant family — then quit on principle: "if TikTok was the only way I could make lots of money then I don't have the skill to deserve it in the first place." - 2021-2025 — Valorant (his first FPS): started at Iron, the lowest rank, and climbed to Radiant; peaked top-25 on the NA leaderboard, 8x Radiant across seasons, set the CVAL (Riot's official collegiate circuit) record for highest ACS in playoffs, won a LAN; declined scholarship offers and Tier 2 pro team trials. Played CVAL for uOttawa Garnet under the handle SpongeElfShirt (roster and placements: https://www.vlr.gg/team/10475/uottawa-garnet). He is hard of hearing in his left ear; in tactical FPS, directional audio (footsteps, utility, off-angle info) is one of the primary competitive inputs. - 2022 — graduated high school with a 98% average; accepted with scholarships to the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and every other major Canadian university; chose the University of Ottawa for Software Engineering — enrolled for a semester, then dropped every class to build (never formally dropped out or took leave). - early 2023 — returned to TikTok for one month specifically to prove the earlier success wasn't luck — and repeated it. - → 2026 — Staff Engineer at Latitude.io (AI Dungeon, Voyage; backed by Google, Midjourney, NFX, Roblox's David Baszucki): led Voyage's monetization and the internal/product agent projects, moving team to team by his own choosing, reporting mostly to CEO Nick Walton; personally accounted for ~1/6 of the company's 2026 PRs on a 40-person team. - April 2026 — partial result on Erdős Problem 872 (open 34 years): paper "Improved Bounds for the Primitive-Set Saturation Game", credited as Om_Buddhdev_sensho on Thomas Bloom's erdosproblems.com and Terence Tao's AI-contributions tracker; his fan-capture lower bound was cited and built on by a follow-up note (https://github.com/jonaslsaa/maths/blob/main/872.pdf). Built the agent research harnesses (erdos-co-researcher, public) that produced it. - July 24, 2026 — during the Y Combinator S26 batch, claimed proof of L(n) = o(n) for Erdős Problem 872, answering two of Erdős's three questions in the negative via a new quotient-cone recursion theorem for divisibility saturation games; the remaining question — the true order of L(n) — stays open. Game-theoretic core kernel-checked in Lean (one analytic sieve lemma proved in the manuscript, not yet formalized); proof claim submitted to erdosproblems.com July 30, 2026, under community audit. Theorem writeup, lean proof, and the full research record are public (https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness; archived preprint doi:10.5281/zenodo.21545919, research record doi:10.5281/zenodo.21545890). - 2026 — founded Olam Labs (YC S26): simulated multi-agent environments and arenas where humans play alongside AI agents, aimed at the shortage of good AI evals. ### Me The most important problem of my life will be contributing in any way to make sure AI goes well for everyone. My brain only engages with what I am curious about, and most of the time nowadays that tends to be topics in multi-agent work, AI, science, and economics. I am also a bit obsessive and competitive about the topics I enjoy. I hope to continue that for a long time because it is really fun to learn and then apply it to see the fruits it bears. ### Present - **olam labs (yc s26)** co-founder/CEO: multi-agent environments are amazing and the future of AI progress in many ways, and we are building the entire stack for it. - **20 to 21 yo — product engineer and then staff engineer @ latitude.io**: i jumped around to whichever teams i saw room to improve, leading projects on AI agents, AI infra, product, and platform. Latitude is the company behind AI Dungeon and Voyage, backed by Google, Roblox execs, Midjourney, and others. - **9 to 12 yo — very serious and professional content creator**: [youtube channel where i posted about exploits and pc building](https://www.youtube.com/@brobcYT); [my (really bad) weebly blog](https://wasdqwe.weebly.com/about.html) --- ## /autonomous-research — https://sensho.xyz/autonomous-research *4/21/2026* > why fully autonomous research systems are inevitable, notes from doing AI-driven math research ### Full post ## autonomous research ![autonomous research program chart](/blog/program-chart.svg) Fully autonomous research systems are inevitable. The state of AI-driven research today is where AI for coding was 8 to 12 months ago. Inconsistent moments of amazement with spiky task and prompt dependent performance. Right now, AI-driven research is very primitive. You need a human handling the systems end-to-end, similar to what coding is to software engineering. Most AI-driven research today is from humans fitting the AI within a narrow enough problem space for them to make progress. The mistake that some people make here is assuming that humans will always be necessary for this and there is some kind of abstract "research taste" that will be necessary in the near term future to do SOTA research. We are at a temporary moment in time where humans are needed to get the most out of these systems as they scale and iterate, but said scaling and iterating is converging on replacing the handler - not the other way around. When I do research with AIs, this is what I provide them: - Mistake analysis - Verification - Coordination - Compute access - Process - Research Strategy - Continual learning over long contexts - Pattern recognition on long horizons (basically all of the above haha) I am not providing any value that cannot eventually be solved. Everything that I am doing and more is verifiable and will therefore be solved. Some are compute constrained, some are capability constrained, some are RL resource constrained, some are tooling constrained - but in this industry, a constraint has almost always implied solvability. After my experience using these systems, I do not think an autonomous frontier research agent can exist today. Most labs or companies claiming otherwise right now have not built a true harness. Most are using hack-y harnesses that force certain behaviors that do not scale or generalize with model behavior. In the near future, the best harnesses are those that use minimal task-specific tooling, the ideal harness for coding will also be the ideal harness for research, marketing, etc. The greatest lesson of my harness engineering endeavours is that a generalized harness is what the future will seek. This is because as we race to make every domain in society verifiable, we want the harness used to hit verifiable targets to be generalized as well (including for research). It's very likely that the great task for diffusion, acceleration, society, etc. over the coming decade with AI advances will be making *all* domains verifiable to AI systems to fit this trend line of how real progress gets made with AI. You are doing your harness engineering correctly if, when a model upgrade comes and you swap it in, that the system is immediately upgraded and then extensible by just adding more tools, context, and verifiability on its work rather than changing the core primitives the system operates on. This is similar to the vast swath of coding agents made in 2024 that have all now centralized to a core agent tool loop + file tree system. Therefore, in my personal research ventures I apply the same base primitives that coding agents use and then just expand upon them. AI requires scale by its very nature, even with every algorithmic advancement in the world it is the great polarizer of any distribution. The best AI systems will only be more centralized and resource intensive going forward. Attempting to argue that the best near term systems will prefer different harnesses is a fight against the centralizing and verification tendencies of this entire domain by its nature. File trees are a horribly inefficient way for models to build continual learning - but it works with human guidance (for now) and can generalize a model's ability far more than its in-context learning window and is already existing proof that the value that humans provide to these systems is going to diminish with time as we find more processes to eliminate the work that we do. The design is pretty simple, a continuous orchestrator that follows the repo's guidelines and principles to synthesize and analyze the work so far. There is no part of the research program that does not exist in the file tree. If anything exists outside of the file tree it is lost forever. Until we get unlimited and perfect attention algorithms for context (or continual learning) this must be a core principle for any system. If it exists in the file tree you apply many fun agent techniques over it to make the research process streamlined. It has enabled helpful techniques like front-matter, skills, third opinions, custom tools, etc. that help make the manual process that humans do prompting GPT Pro in ChatGPT easier. These are pretty basic primitives and nothing revolutionary is done here - because there doesn't need to be. The models are not trained to run on your custom research loop that guides it in a certain way to approach research, that will not work long-term and just be deprecated as model capabilities expand. I'd like to write a long piece on my experience using the systems today and the specific weaknesses but I don't think that will be valuable for long. I think the best assessment will be, for people like me who cannot prove any of the math in the papers I write myself, what value do I provide? Those will be the best tell of the current bottlenecks and work to be done - which labs are already racing to (attempt to) do. I can envision a day <1 year where a mid tier unsolved Erdős-level problem is put into a box and a lean verified solution returns later. Math, and to some extent, STEM research, is one of the easier ones because it is arguably even more verifiable than most of the day-to-day consumer uses for AI. This doesn't mean I don't think the other problems won't get solved either; simulated worlds, scaling RL (and letting different environments generalize), etc. there are many roads to solving more "abstractly" verified domains. It sounds cringe to write out and sounded cooler in my head but I can definitely see a world where all "first-time events" in the modern day like an AI in a position of government, running businesses, etc. have all been simulated countless times in worlds against trillions of AI agents recursively improving themselves through RL and the best one wins out and comes to human land. Lol. What a beautiful world we live in where I can write that and it's a genuine possibility. We should realize that the bottleneck to progress is how to conform our human systems to these, not the other way around, and then operate on that principle for future changes. I'm sorry that I have very little to personally offer to frontier research, if I did maybe I could help get my point across better. But I do hope that my work helps at least someone see the value in utilizing these systems to advance humanity in any domain and the good that can come of it. If you think there is a mistake in any of my work or there is some major way to improve please email me at om@olamlabs.ai, I will try my best to fix it. --- ## /research-work — https://sensho.xyz/research-work *4/21/2026* > in my free time I try to help with and learn from math and astrophysics research using research agent harnesses ### Work - [Erdős 872, L(n) = o(n) claimed proof: theorem writeup (July 24, 2026)](https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness/blob/main/erdos-872/researcher-R179-lean-verified-manuscript.md) — the claimed L(n) = o(n) proof for Erdős Problem 872, answering two of Erdős's three questions in the negative via a new quotient-cone recursion theorem for divisibility saturation games; the true order of L(n) remains open. submitted to erdosproblems.com July 30, 2026, under community audit. archived preprint: doi:10.5281/zenodo.21545919. - [Erdős 872 claimed proof: lean formalization](https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness/tree/main/erdos-872/lean/r177_verification) — lean formalization of the claimed proof: the game-theoretic core is kernel-checked; one analytic sieve lemma (Lemma 2.3) is proved in the manuscript and not yet formalized. - [Erdős 872 claimed proof: research record](https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness) — the full research record and verification chain. archived: doi:10.5281/zenodo.21545890. - [paper](/papers/erdos-872.pdf) — Improved Bounds for the Primitive-Set Saturation Game (Erdős Problem 872), a partial contribution to a 34-year-old unresolved Erdős problem. (Update July 2026: the claimed o(n) proof above answers two of Erdős's three questions; the true order of L(n) remains open.) - [erdos harness](https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-harness) — lean proofs and research rounds using the erdos co-researcher harness that led to the erdős problem 872 partial result. - [erdos co-researcher](https://github.com/xa8zz/erdos-co-researcher) — the public co-researcher agent/harness i built to help automate math research, anyone can clone it. ### Posts - [autonomous research](https://sensho.xyz/autonomous-research) — why fully autonomous research systems are inevitable, notes from doing AI-driven math research. ### Highlights my results on erdős problem 872 are posted under Om_Buddhdev_sensho and were credited by both [thomas bloom](https://www.erdosproblems.com/872) and [terence tao](https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contributions-to-Erd%C5%91s-problems). they've done amazing work advancing and tracking AI's progress on hillclimbing math as a domain, it was actually a tao podcast that nudged me to get involved in the first place, so the whole thing's been a bit full-circle :) ### Full post --- ## /esports — https://sensho.xyz/esports *8/12/2025* > peaked top 25 in valorant, 8x season radiant, CVAL record holder, top 100 in fortnite ### Highlights ### valorant - peaked top 25 NA leaderboard - been radiant for 8 separate seasons; been top 25, 50, 100 to 300 etc. multiple times - played CVAL (Riot Games' official collegiate circuit w/ $500k+ in prizing), made playoffs and deep runs, record for highest ACS in CVAL league - multiple scholarship and t2 team trial offers ### fortnite - top 100 FNCS, multiple top 200 to 500 FNCS finishes - 20x+ top 1000 tournament finishes ### Full post ## Valorant I started out as iron in Valorant, the lowest rank in the game. It took me a month to get to platinum, four months to immortal, and a year+ to Radiant. It was my first ever competitive FPS. I mostly played Valorant because of how addictive grinding ranked was to my competitive desires. The ranked system in the game is effective, so over ~3 years it ate up free time. I learned a lot about the process of improving, hit multiple of what I thought were "ceilings," and surpassed them. Playing against (and farming) pro players and popular streamers in ranked is also very fun :p. I had no plans or desire to ever pursue competitive Valorant beyond ranked as it doesn't align with what I wanna do long-term, it was just a competitive outlet for me. Playing pro and competitive at a high level is typically a 12 hours/day career and I wouldn't be able to fit my life desires if I was doing that for years. This was until my school friends asked me (a lot) to join the college Valorant team and apply my skills there. I joined on the condition that we wouldn't be scrimmaging or having practices that take up lots of time outside of matches; they agreed so I played. I was playing CVAL, which is considered Tier 2 valorant: basically a level below the official professional circuit with large salaries and such. In the last semester of CVAL I played, I set the record for the highest ACS (combat score, measure of your impact) during playoffs. I was elite at it and the matches in and of themselves were extremely enjoyable. Both teams are fully trying, lots of practice (from the other team at least) with set strategies, warm-ups, etc. and you lay it all down in a Best of 3 or 5 series that takes hours. Our team made some decent runs and had success, and I had good teammates that set up to enable me well. I also played in a couple of LANs, winning one of them with some fun memories doing so. As of writing this I'm still Radiant top 300 in November 2025, but that's only because this ranked season hasn't ended yet. I've only played 4-5 matches in the past month and don't intend on playing actively again as it draws my attention from other things I want to do. I've had outreach from schools with scholarship opportunities and T2 team trial offers. Questions from friends or Valorant players I know are around why I haven't tried pursuing a pro career if I'm able to play and excel at that level; it's weird to people when I try to explain my lack of interest in doing so. I understand why it can seem weird and don't blame them for thinking that way, it's just how I go about life :P. The natural tendencies that let me have fun and do well in Valorant (without getting burnt out unlike other activities) are the same tendencies that urge me to go elsewhere for long-term ventures, and I'm fine with that. My favorite games are, counter to what my background may imply, strategy and RTS games. Factorio, Software Inc, etc. are the kinds of games that I have spent many hours in. The main issue with these games is that there's no expression for competitiveness! At least not to the degree of mainstream esports. Games like League of Legends, CS:GO, and of course, Valorant, have many ranked players in a pretty meritocratic system. Unlike what players complain about, most people deserve their rank and it's a function of skill. So even though the mechanics of the game itself aren't intellectually interesting to me, esports as a medium for my obsessiveness and competitive desires has been an enjoyable outlet. The idea of a meritocratic, competitive playground with an objective leaderboard that quantifies your skill and rewards you for it has always been appealing to me, even in domains outside of gaming. ## Fortnite Fortnite was my first competitive shooter! Prior to this I had mainly played Roblox, Minecraft, and strategy/RTS games. People like to clown on Fortnite competitively as it's a tier 2 esport and considered a childish game. I actually think Fortnite is the hardest competitive shooter out there. The building mechanic adds a huge skill gap that can't be pre-learned/transferred from other games. This means anyone good at Fortnite actually needs to put in effort to become good at building, editing, aiming, and all other mechanics. The tournaments are also open to play by anyone and online, so access is easy and meritocratic. I got into Fortnite during OG Fortnite in 2018; I played with my school friends and had a blast. I continued playing as the OG hype died down and got into playing tournaments/Fortnite esports with a few friends. It was similar to Valorant — just a side hobby during early high school. I had some tournament earnings and decent placements but my success was lower relative to Valorant. In both games though I never cared for competing in esports itself much full-time, it was just a competitive hobby that I happened to get good at as an outlet. In Fortnite my playstyle was known for being very mechanics heavy; I'd mastered building, editing, and aiming through grinding Creative mode and would just win lots of fights in tournament matches. Eventually after hitting a ceiling I was able to learn better game sense and improve that, peaking around Top 100 and 200 finishes in FNCS (main esports event). --- ## /tiktok — https://sensho.xyz/tiktok *8/12/2025* > made content about finance events. 195k followers and 50m+ views in ~2 months ### Highlights - end of '21 to early '22 I was a content creator on tiktok - grew my tiktok account of me talking about finance events from 0 to 195k followers and 50m+ views in <2 months - focused heavily on content strategy: studying videos, retention, popular formats, storytelling, viral design, etc. basically tried memetic theory applied to tiktok - ran a Discord server for my community with 9k members ### Full post From some small successes on Roblox at a young age I had earned around $10k in my early to mid teens. For someone that wanted money so I could buy a PC, I didn't really know what to do with the rest and also kept it private from my parents so it kind of just sat there. Eventually I learned that the thing I was holding my money in, crypto, randomly goes up and down in price and I was curious how that worked. So I spent time reading: I started with all of the major white papers -> reading about blockchains -> learning markets -> etc. I eventually got to the stock market and had a solid grasp of economics and modern finance. It's also worth mentioning here that when I was 12 I played a Minecraft server called HelloMiners with 150k players where I became one of the wealthiest on the server (if you played HM and are reading this email me at om@olamlabs.ai, I was MrSuperRed!). The main way I got the wealthiest in that server relative to everyone else was that I ran a bank and did a bunch of financing, asset deals, etc. which is the unconventional path that hadn't really been done before at scale in the server. At the time I didn't really know I was doing modern banking but I ended up acquiring my way into owning some of the most valuable properties, owning the stock exchange, and a majority share of the commerce industry (GNR Inc!). When I quit for Roblox developing I gave most of what I had away and gave my properties to new users that were grinding. I went on that little Minecraft story tangent because I think a lot of the interests ended up transferring over to when I eventually got to TikTok. I used the ~$10k that I had and some knowledge of markets to trade my way up, getting to around 20-30k (don't remember) and then started making content about what I saw happening in finance and crypto. It was more an expression of my fascination with markets and systems at scale. I started learning a lot about storytelling, viral formats, retention, etc. and did quite well. In under 2 months I amassed 195k followers and 50m+ views. The other (funny?) part was that I normally kept all of my "weird" personal ventures like Roblox and Minecraft servers at the time to myself, but because a lot of my videos went viral pretty much everyone at my school saw them over Christmas break and I came back to everyone asking me about it. After a bit though, my original fascination with how markets worked had turned into making viral bait content and not a medium to be completely genuine. And unlike my experience with some of the AI and tech industry so far, there were not really people in it that actually enjoyed the theory and concepts behind what they were doing. Most of my content creator peers and those that got in touch with me talked about doing sponsored collabs, pumping coins, etc. and not "wow check out the applications of this paper on ...". It became a bit isolating and I started posting less and less frequently. I did really enjoy operating the business and my Discord server but the best way I can put it is "I liked operating the juice machine but not the juice that it produced". My immigrant family that I financially supported at this point, alongside some friends, thought that I had literally lost my mind when I told them I was probably quitting TikTok. Coming from gaming and online meritocratic platforms, when my Dad asked me why I wouldn't make the most of this opportunity I straight up told him that "if TikTok was the only way I could make lots of money then I don't have the skill to deserve it in the first place". Which is what 17-year-old naive/anime fueled Om genuinely believed and that if my TikTok success was a product of luck then I haven't actually progressed in life, and that the skills that let me make money can be applied elsewhere to something more enjoyable, since I believed "enjoy what you do so it doesn't feel like work" along with some other outcome achieving traits = ideal. I actually do think in hindsight that learning the skills and intuition of being a content creator while not pursuing it as a full time pathway, similar to other endeavors that I'm no longer doing, was extremely valuable because it allowed me to enjoy my interests even more long-term. I think if I leaned into it too hard I would've strayed down the path of materialism and clout chasing a lot of Gen Z'ers my age have mistakenly gone down. You know how there's the theory of "Lost Einsteins"? I think there's a good amount of that which can apply to people who derive status from social media and pursue it rather than deriving their pleasures through something that can ultimately be much more impactful. Social media is an incredibly powerful tool and at its limit is the ability to control attention, but that doesn't really matter if you're controlling attention to something (or someone) that cannot differentiate or find PMF in what they're offering long term besides just the ability to wield said attention. Nowadays I get to build the same systems I loved participating in (simulated environments) and test them with the best generalized AI models in the world and somehow make money doing it which is literally my dream encapsulation of all of the different types of backgrounds that I have lmao. ## Tangent The part that I initially was looking forward to when I got into content was meeting likeminded people like myself. I thought people in this industry were also curious about video formats, finance theory, etc. Unfortunately, that did not happen much. There were interesting people, but a lot of the people in that content niche are what you'd expect from finance content creators. More of the grifty and greedy archetype who were not enjoyable people to interact with for someone like me who does things out of interest/curiosity. I don't even have a problem with the greed — I understand it; it was more the lack of passion that made interactions uninteresting. After my initial optimism I eventually stopped talking to others in that creator space, and just focused on my own content. On top of the content itself getting boring, there was the status value/expectations of it all — everyone around me IRL telling me how great this was despite my dismay. I've gotten told I should've kept going for finances, but I was thankfully in a position to not need to. College was starting up near this point and I got to enjoy the remainder of the last summer I had before school. In early 2023 I got back into it for a month for two main reasons: 1) I had a friend that thought my earlier success with this was purely luck and I wanted to disprove him. 2) I wanted to see if maybe I'd enjoy the content itself this time and that things could have changed. I started posting on the account again and succeeded in disproving my friend. The second hope did not go well though, as I still found the industry grifty and cringe. I considered pivoting into a different niche or changing up content but I actually started enjoying the other projects I was working on a lot more at the time. Since this project I haven't attempted content/distribution ventures like this and only post on social media for personal enjoyment, but this experience was extremely formative for me. Beyond just what I got good at while running the operation, I learned a lot about what I like, dislike, and schools of thought around fulfillment. It's helped me learn what I actually like doing now. Some of the stuff that I learned here around growth, distribution, memetic theory, system/constraint optimization, and business development I still enjoy — but only in combination with the other stuff I've learned that I like! :) --- ## /roblox-dev — https://sensho.xyz/roblox-dev *8/12/2025* > was a Roblox developer with ~6m visits and did many other things during my early childhood on the platform ### Highlights - start of COVID to end of 2020 i ran a roblox game studio that built games - generated ~6M game visits across our own games - led roblox groups, devs, community, support, etc. ### Full post I played a large amount of Roblox growing up and did a variety of things on the platform. It taught me a lot and gave me fun memories with friends and learning skills early on that I would've never been able to know otherwise. During the mentioned time, I combined a lot of the skills I'd picked up in the Roblox ecosystem to run a Roblox game studio; it's given me lasting memories because I got to involve friends in the operation. This was a project that I ran during school and was mainly a way for my group of friends to work on something together. I led most of the efforts: directing our development and roadmap. We initially made a few games on our own that did well, hitting the front page of some Roblox game categories (for a short period). The games we made weren't that innovative or good (they were slop in retrospect, lol). We just did remixes and iterations of currently existing game formats; this made development time and updating much easier. This was a deliberate choice that we made knowing what kinds of games people liked on Roblox. After we had some success in our games, the funds were used to get involved in other upcoming games. This was because through me and friends, we knew lots of other people we found cool working on their own games. Some of them were newer devs that, e.g., needed help with scripting or didn't want to manage things like monetization or communities. We would join game projects we found interesting and help with technical or operational aspects. It sounds generic but genuinely my favorite part was making updates/changes and hoping players would react well. It involved parts like developing fast in and of itself but also methodologies on finding out what users wanted. This was part of the reasoning behind not trying to make the game unnecessarily complex or innovative without user feedback. The goal was to iterate through their feedback quickly. The most successful game in Roblox history "Grow a Garden" which was released in 2025 also utilizes this concept of simplicity. Towards the end of 2020 I had moved on to some other interests, so I passed leading our group to one of my close friends that was highly competent. After a few more months, our game studio was eventually disbanded; this wasn't due to the new leader but rather that most of our friend group had grown more experienced, older, and connected, which led to everyone having their own self-interests in Roblox to pursue. I'm not upset over that, rather I'm happy our project was fruitful and let us have a large impact on Roblox. The close friend that I had let lead is now one of the biggest Roblox developers, with many others going on to do cool things in the ecosystem as well! I don't really know what I'd be doing if I had not played Roblox so early on in my childhood, the butterfly effects from it are pretty insane when I look back on it combined with the path I've taken and what contributed to success in different domains. Roblox and the internet in general substituted for pretty much all of the connections, education, wealth, etc. that having them IRL provides you with early on in life — things an immigrant family in Kingston, Ontario would not normally have access to — all by myself with a crappy laptop and a bedtime. I played it before mass slopification when it was a lot more about the devs wanting to recreate an online civilization. They had currency markets, paid advertisements with their platform currency, on-platform companies, and much more. You could run an actual organization with just robux. When I first started I would play the games I like and made crappy YouTube videos on them, I made my first account when I was 6 or 7 and immersed myself in the early days of the platform for years. Roleplaying, sword fighting, and much more. I was really interested in all of the cool hats everyone would wear that were "Limited" and that they would flex in-game. Turned out there was a full-on item trading economy, similar to Pokemon card trading, where items had real $ values and people exchanged on platform for other items. I got into trading and learnt about all of the communities (LMAD!) and met lots of interesting people. I eventually did pretty well trading and made a YouTube channel that got ~500k views and 2k subs (a lot for middle school Om and crappy Camtasia recording) about my limited item trading strategies, tips, etc. --- ## /education — https://sensho.xyz/education *8/12/2025* > software engineering at uOttawa (on leave) ### Highlights - attending the University of Ottawa for Software Engineering, on temporary leave - accepted to all major Canadian schools (Waterloo, UofT, others) - scholarships to all major schools - 98% high school grade average for school applications ### Full post I don't have too much to write here unlike the other sections. I am grateful to live a life where my curiosity alone is enough to get me far in anything that I want to do in the most exciting time in human history. I think that school can be valuable and is what you make of it; I just prefer to do that in random areas that I get interested in instead. It's not really because I work hard or that I'm disciplined (rather, the opposite), but that I'm acting in my own self-interest because I genuinely love what I do and get to think about more than I could at a school.