Felix Brener

About

Applied AI engineer in New York.B.S. neuroscience, B.A. economics,University of Rochester, class of 2027.

Applied AI engineer in New York. B.S. neuroscience, B.A. economics, University of Rochester, class of 2027.

Felix Brener

Download PDF

Education

University of Rochester

B.S. in Biological Sciences: Neuroscience; B.A. in Economics

Expected May 2027Rochester, NY

Coursework: Advanced Computational Neuroscience, Advanced Statistical Methodology, Microeconomics, Genetics; in progress: Brain-Machine Interfaces, Data Methods for Economists, Developmental Biology.

Experience

Quadrant Capital Advisors, Inc.

Summer AI Analyst

May–August 2026New York, NY

  • Built four Claude-based research tools for equity and credit analysts, including a batch Porter’s Five Forces pipeline that automated manual reviews at 99% concordance with senior analyst baselines, cutting turnaround by weeks.
  • Automated quarterly research updates with a pipeline that diffs new SEC filings and earnings materials against prior snapshots and records what changed for public-equity and credit review.
  • Shipped an AlphaSense-fed updater that refreshes existing analyst workbooks with source-attribution links and validation checks, and a screener that narrows the full ticker universe to a short list for deeper research.
  • Read more

DriverCourseOnline

Co-Founder / Developer

April 2025–presentNew York, NY

  • Built a New York State online pre-licensing course to DMV DTP-402 rules (Next.js, TypeScript, Firebase): server-enforced 270-minute seat time, identity checks down to keystroke dynamics, a three-strike lockout, and electronic completion reporting to the DMV. Awaiting DMV approval.
  • Deploys gated on 70+ compliance, end-to-end, and security test suites (Docker, GitHub Actions, AWS App Runner); idempotent Stripe payments; S3 Object Lock retention; daily Firestore backups to S3.
  • Read more

Mount Sinai Hospital, Abilities Research Center

Research Assistant

October 2022–August 2023, May–August 2024New York, NY

  • Co-authored a paper on smartphone heart-rate-variability baselines for concussion in 752 adolescent athletes (Med. Sci. Sports Exerc.; ACSM 2025); built ML pose tracking from video and quaternion-based iPhone motion tracking.

Projects and open source

Open-Weight Models for Apple Silicon

Hugging Face (10,700+ downloads), GitHub

July–October 2026

  • Built MOSS-Image Turbo: 6× faster than the official 50 steps (12.4 min to 119 s, M4 Pro) without the stamped textures of community few-step (DMD) adapters. Traced them to repeated distilled steps mid-trajectory; fixed it with trajectory-regression training on teacher-relabelled targets; passed a pre-registered test on 32 held-out prompts.
  • Ported OpenMOSS’s 5B bilingual text-rendering DiT, MOSS-Image, to pure MLX, exact against official PyTorch (69.7 dB end to end in fp32; official seeds reproduce official images). The 8-bit tier peaks at 9.3 GB vs. 38.7 GB for mlx-vlm’s port, with OCR recall identical to bf16. Also ported FLUX 3 Image Klein (cosine 0.9999 vs. BFL).
  • Shipped both ports as pip-installable packages with command-line tools (moss-image-mlx, flux3-mlx).
  • Extracted Qwen3.8-27B’s multi-token-prediction head as a speculative-decoding drafter (up to 1.89× faster on coding prompts) and released 6-bit MLX weights with a full-precision vision tower; 7,700+ downloads across both.
  • Distilled Ideogram 4 for MLX by folding classifier-free guidance into one branch and cutting steps: 2.9× faster at 800×992 on an M4 Pro (250 s to 86 s), quantized to 18.6 GB to run on a 48 GB Mac.
  • Read more

Filmstock Responsiveness Benchmark

GitHub

May–September 2026

  • Designed a full-factorial eval of how image models respond to filmstock, lighting, and scan language (288 images, 195 features; PCA, MANOVA, PERMANOVA). A September replication found the newer model 24% less responsive to filmstock, 14% to lighting, and 37% to scan language (Holm-adjusted p < .001). 31-page write-up.
  • Read more

Gesso Club

Founder, gessoclub.com

June 2026–present

  • Curate an AI-image archive that keeps each image’s model, prompt, and workflow; built its Builder, which compiles camera, lens, film, and lighting choices into prompts for five model formats.
  • Read more

Skills

Languages & Data
Python (pandas, NumPy, SciPy, scikit-learn, Matplotlib, Plotly), TypeScript, SQL
AI/ML
LLM evals, Claude API, PyTorch, ComfyUI, MLX (ports, quantization, distillation, speculative decoding)
Infrastructure
Next.js, Node.js, Firebase, AWS (App Runner, S3, SES), Stripe, Redis, Docker, GitHub Actions

Download PDF