Waseem AlShikh

Career

AlShikh and May Habib began working together in 2013, when they started a company to localize enterprise content dynamically using machine translation. Their experiments with transformer models led them to launch WRITER in 2020, where AlShikh is CTO.¹

Research

AlShikh is the last-listed author of Writing in the Margins, a 2024 paper on a chunked prefill approach for long-context retrieval. The method adds "margin" notes generated for each chunk and uses them to steer the final answer.²

WRITER's flagship model today, Palmyra X6, is the default model across the WRITER platform and is built for long-running agentic work; the company says it can hold one goal for hours.³

Work and contributions

• Writing in the Margins: Better Inference Pattern for Long Context Retrieval

  Co-author of a 2024 paper introducing Writing in the Margins, an inference pattern that processes long inputs in chunks and generates intermediate notes to guide a model toward the relevant information.²

• Palmyra model family

  CTO of the company that builds the Palmyra models, whose flagship Palmyra X6 is the default model on the WRITER platform.³¹

Timeline

1. 2013Co-founded a first company with May Habib to localize enterprise content using machine translation.¹
2. 2020Co-founded WRITER with May Habib.¹
3. Aug 27, 2024Co-authored Writing in the Margins, a paper on inference for long-context retrieval.²

Where they work

• WRITER 2 people in the wiki

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