cora kyler

Greetings! I am currently the co-founder and webmaster of all the projects we create at Wired Labs, where I have the great honor of working with technologists I admire. Day-to day, I share the product helm, design the architecture, and ship the code.

I am known for having created SOON, a popular dating app in San Francisco!

I never planned to start a company. Before I began hacking on SOON, I was a Cota-Robles Fellow and PhD student at UC Berkeley, where I came to study philosophy and languages and made the leap to logic.

Before Berkeley, I attended the University of Cambridge (MPhil) and the University of Virginia (BA), where I studied philosophy, pure mathematics, and a handful of languages including Greek and Arabic.

During my PhD, I set myself the (mostly recreational) task of translating Nasīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī's 1248 CE recension of Euclid's Elements, written in Classical Arabic. With no suitable machine-translation tool available, I worked with the aid of a grammar book and dictionary.

The manual process soon felt absurd, especially as large language model research was getting hot. I began assembling a dedicated training corpus to automate my translation tasks. I skipped out on coursework and played with the Helsinki NLP crew's Arabic→English OPUS-MT (the beefy version is here) and fine tuning on proof-based parallel texts.

I also spent a few months exploring automated theorem proving; Lean and Agda caught my interest, though I only scratched the surface.

Oddly enough, in 2022, I began hacking away on a "side quest," which was a dating app. I was single at the time and spent what little "outside" time I had going on dating app dates, so the project hijacked plenty of my neural circuits and I left Berkeley early.

It was a great way to learn how to build stuff (pre-LLMs for coding tasks). SOON slowly, and then all at once, morphed into a company with a significant San Francisco-based following and thousands of daily active users.

We ended up retiring SOON the product, and moving onto new projects in consumer social, where innovation beckons.

However, I recently gave a talk on our findings, at Stanford's RAIN (Research on Algorithms and Incentives in Networks) Seminar. The spirit of this research continues to inform our work at Wired Labs and I still work with my best friend Alena, who co-founded SOON with me.

Lastly, I'm really into music and music history, particularly the punk/post-punk movement! Mark Fisher's brilliant work frames much of my thinking about culture, and I return to his ideas often.

Reach out if any of this sounds cool, especially if you are in San Francisco and want to grab a coffee: cora@wiredlabs.so