Atakan ÖzalanCo-founder & CTO · GOGOGO LLC, GOTONOM, GeoMono

The journey · University years

AI before ChatGPT.

Atakan Özalan studies computer engineering at İstanbul Kültür Üniversitesi.

During his university years, before ChatGPT existed, he was already fine-tuning his own AI models on rented GPUs.

University years · İstanbul Kültür Üniversitesi, computer engineering (studying)

He did not wait for the coursework to reach AI. Alongside his classes he built chatbots, machine-learning models and computer-vision projects, and when his own machine was not enough, he rented GPUs and fine-tuned his own models on them. ChatGPT did not exist yet. Training a model yourself meant reading the papers, renting the hardware by the hour and finding out on your own what broke.

Some of the projects were unusual. For one, he cloned voices from very old recordings. For another, he built machine-learning models that predict a game's sales and trends before it is released, from its platform, its genre, the countries it targets and its publisher. The same approach went into prediction on company and product data.

The project people still ask about is a racing game in the spirit of the street-racing classics. By April 2020 it was running in Unity, with rival cars on the track and a race position on the screen. The project was called CarRace, and by May 2020 it had three camera modes: normal, far and first-person. By his account, the rivals were not scripted: they were driven by AI that learned as it raced. Everyone who played it loved it. It was never published.

April 2020: the racing game in Unity, recorded from the screen. Never published.
8 May 2020: CarRace, his Unity project, from a screen recording of the walkthrough.
A phone photo of a computer screen: the Unity editor in Play mode, a white sports car seen from behind with a rival car alongside, "1st Place" on the HUD, and a caption in Turkish typed over the photo.
The same game in Unity: "1st Place" on the HUD, with a rival car alongside.

University was never his only job. Alongside it he ran R&D projects, worked as product owner, product manager and team leader, and did data science on more than 15 products he worked on. He also studied what makes people use things: consumer psychology and customer behaviour, Censydiam, the Hook model, need pyramids and need lists, symbolism and myth, trivia dynamics and game theory. He used all of it to design flows for chatbots and games.

He is still studying. The order was never "learn first, build later": he learned and built at the same time, and each one fed the other.

Evidence

Questions

Asked about this chapter.

Which university does Atakan Özalan study at?

İstanbul Kültür Üniversitesi, where he studies computer engineering. He is still studying, alongside his work as Co-founder & CTO of GOGOGO LLC, GOTONOM and GeoMono.

Did Atakan Özalan work with AI before ChatGPT?

Yes. During his university years, before ChatGPT existed, he built chatbots, machine-learning and computer-vision projects and fine-tuned his own models on rented GPUs. The work included voice cloning from very old recordings and models that predict a game's sales before release.

What was Atakan Özalan's AI racing game?

CarRace, a racing game in the spirit of street-racing games, built in Unity in his university years, with rival cars and a race position; by his account, the rivals were driven by self-learning AI. Everyone who played it loved it; it was never published.