Driven by Curiosity, Shaped by Choices and People: My Precog Story

Ok so I (Raghav) haven’t written blogs per se before so please cut me some slack if something’s off here, but here goes, hope you find it interesting : )

My journey at Precog begins with me in H-105 (classroom in IIITH) at the annual Precog info session. I’m there with a few of my friends – Wait, but before we get to this, let’s talk a bit about why I landed up at that info session in the first place.

So this was around the end of second year, there’s a lot of chatter going around about BTPs or research and which lab you want to choose. This is also the last semester when the college tells you what to do, from the next semester onwards you choose a lot of your courses and the research path you want to take, if you decide to take it in the first place. In college, I think the common undercurrent among the choices I took and the things I decided to do was to try everything that seemed interesting, obviously weighing my options before I made a choice, but I tried to expose myself to anything that piqued my interest. And at that time, I decided to try out research, cause I doubt when / where else I could’ve had a better opportunity to explore it. And the info session seemed like the perfect opportunity to get some insight into how / what research could be.

Anyways back to the story, we’re listening in on the info session, and PK drops this line which held true for most of my college time – “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities”. Something about PK’s presentation and the vibe of the lab was infectious, and that’s something I understood later, once I joined the lab, we’ll get to that.

Fast forward to day 0 of the Precog experience. We had an orientation session with Precog members and PK, and it was an intro into the culture and how research works at Precog. Somehow, we got into talking about podcasts and if Precog could have a podcast, I half-jokingly said I could have a shot at it, PK laughed and said if you actually pull it off I’ll give you your honors credits for that :P.

My first project at Precog was a project exploring the possibilities of LLMs in the legal domain in collaboration with Prof Balaraman Ravindran from IIT-Madras’ CeRAI Lab. It was my first project with my lab members (Ishan, Hanuma, and Anmol), involving a collaborative effort with another team (Dr. Gokul, Yogesh, Sahil, and Shreya) and I learnt a lot of things along the way, the project pivoted in between but in the end after months of effort we were able to produce some really amazing work that got published at JURIX 2024. This was a massive project and was pivotal in how I worked and collaborated with multiple people, produce a cohesive project and also taught me a lot about the research process (special thanks to Anmol). It was a stepping stone for what was coming next.

In retrospect, when I look back during my time at Precog, I didn’t fully understand it at that time, but there couldn’t have been a better time to be exposed to the absolute bleeding edge of ML/LLMs/Agents/AI Safety and pushing the boundaries and exploring these areas. The flexibility that the lab gives is unparalleled in terms of deciding projects, scope and even field of research – as long as it’s exciting and impactful. You have the opportunity to work with multiple teams, make key decisions end to end and work on something you truly are interested in, and the incredible thing is that your drive for the project is mirrored by the people in the lab and this enables the project to take off. To be surrounded by ridiculously passionate and smart people and having the opportunity to work in the ML space in a time when a new LLM was dropping literally everyday was an amazing experience. As they say, hindsight’s always 20/20.

I think among all the projects and work that happens at Precog, you learn to take ownership and drive projects that you are interested in, and the result is some high-impact work. Of course when you take ownership, you get everything – since it’s research you come across some really exciting and amazing stuff and things go your way, and sometimes yeah, you feel like you should’ve taken that podcast option from PK :P. But at the end, after looking at what your team accomplished, you never regret going through with the project.

After the Legal AI project, me and Ishan were looking to explore miniaturizing LLMs and essentially research around efficient and smaller LLMs – known as SLMs. I happened to read a few papers on tool calling at the time—a technology that was the precursor to what we call now as AI Agents. The thought of having SLMs operating as highly specialized agents, on-device all around you seemed like a really exciting idea. We pitched this idea to PK and Prof Karthik, quickly kicking off the project in collaboration with SERC. The project involved handling a bunch of tasks and a lot of juggling since it was just 2 students and 2 profs, but was a very incredible opportunity.

During the course of this project we made quite a few presentations, presenting to multiple researchers and people as the project took shape, continuously incorporating reviews and refining the project. A thing I took away from this was – showcasing your work and making sure you create a presentation that is informative but has something that the audience can remember your work by even after the presentation is over – Something amongst all the information in the slides that the audience can really hook into.

Along the way, we uncovered some fascinating and unexpected insights, which ultimately led to our work being published at EASE 2025. Was pretty exciting to see NVIDIA’s work, highlighting that SLMs are the future of AI agents, on this come out not long after ours, felt like the community was heading in the same direction we’d been thinking about.

Wrapping up, the choice to try out research in college was a fantastic one and one hell of a roller coaster. Shoutout to Ishan, Akshit and Ishwar for making this a memorable experience, and Ishan for working with me on all the Precog projects and to everyone who made Precog, Precog. I really valued PK for creating an environment that encouraged curiosity, impact-driven ideas and to constantly challenge ourselves.

The curiosity to explore something unknown, but something you are genuinely interested in or believe you can excel at, is a powerful engine. When you pair that with a community of smart, passionate individuals who mirror your drive, the sky’s the limit.