Hey, I'm Zach

Building Portal (SPC F25).

Previously led Copilot evals at Microsoft AI.

Some anecdotes

Getting into SPC +
In March 2024, after reading the Set-of-Mark prompting paper, I built a computer use agent on GPT-4V. I have some nerve damage in my arms, so I thought computer use could be a game changer for people with limited mobility. Spent weekends for months in disability labs and at a tech literacy event, building alongside the people it was for. In February 2025 I hosted one of the first agents-for-nonprofits hackathons. That April, I DM'd 15 SPC fellows to get into South Park Commons' hackathon with Anthropic, flew out on 12 hours' notice as the only solo hacker & became a finalist with Yellow Pages. I left Microsoft AI in May 2025, joined SPC as a member a few months later, and was funded a week in.
Tierlists & RLHF +
Spent a week sitting in a Starbucks near UW & interviewing 30 grad/undergrads on if ranking items on a tierlist outperformed pairwise comparisons for gathering preference data in RLHF training.
Saving a feature at Microsoft +
Was told to let an Edge feature die. Bundled the fix with a Copilot PR, got marketing support, and made the case to ship it. Ended up driving a 7x retention gain.
AI for Good hackathon +
Organized an AI Agents for Good Hackathon focused on nonprofit use cases.
Doing a lot at once +
While coordinating daily Copilot metrics reporting across Edge/Windows/Bing, caught 2 bugs that would've broken Copilot for millions of users, ran competitive analysis on AI agents, and built TalkMode from an Airbnb with lots of spiders.
Showing up with a working prototype +
In 2023 I was using WeavRun (a running app that syncs music to pace) and wanted real-time coaching when I slowed down. Emailed them the idea, got a meeting with the Head of Product, and showed up with a working Swift prototype I'd built over the weekend. They offered to add me as a developer. Added a vibration mode for runners with limited hearing. The Rutgers CS faculty also gave it their award for the most creative student project. Two years later Apple shipped something similar with Workout Buddy. I also built Extended a year before Apple's own version — an extension that let you create custom, cloud-agent-created personal Chrome extensions on any website.