About

I'm Patton Lai, a Computer Science student at New York University (expected 2029). I'm interested in building tools that make AI accessible and private, quantitative systems, and software that ships.

My most visible project is Sidekick, a macOS local LLM app with 3.1K+ GitHub stars, ranked #1 for "mac llm app" on Google. I care about privacy-preserving AI and building software people actually use.

Previously, I interned at Finovax doing quantitative finance research, led a 15-person robotics team to 4th place in China and the global championship, and conducted adversarial research on AI detection tools using reinforcement learning.

Before NYU, I studied at YK Pao School in Shanghai where I earned a 41/45 on the International Baccalaureate, receiving the Principal Award and Computer Science Attainment Award.