I'm a self-taught AI builder from a mixed-heritage, first-generation immigrant family, and that background shapes everything I build.

My mother's family fled Laos as refugees during the civil war, and by elementary school she was already translating legal documents for her parents. My father's side traces to Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean. I grew up watching two very different journeys to this country, and I learned the same lesson from both: resilience isn't optional, it's just what you do.

That lesson is why I build the way I build. I taught myself AI from scratch, without a CS degree, because I believe technology should reach the people who've historically had to fight hardest just to be seen. Every tool in this portfolio, for refugees, small business owners, and the nonprofits serving them, comes from that belief.

I'm currently working toward the Claude Corps Fellowship, a program placing early-career builders inside nonprofits across America for a year of full-time, AI-powered impact work.

In the past several weeks I've built six AI tools and a combined platform, every one of them aimed at a specific underserved community:

🔍 SafeProbe — An ethical AI safety evaluation tool using LLM-as-judge to test Claude across 8 real jailbreak categories.

🌍 Refugee Resource Finder — A conversational chatbot helping newly arrived refugees and immigrants in NYC find housing, food, legal aid, ESL, and healthcare, built in honor of my mother's story. 🔗 View live demo

📋 Grant Writing Assistant — Matches nonprofits to real grants and drafts full proposals, for organizations that can't afford a development team.

💰 Loan Readiness Advisor — Built in alignment with Pacific Community Ventures, helping underserved small business owners understand their funding options.

✦ Impact Story Generator — Turns nonprofit program data into donor emails, annual report copy, and social captions.

🧩 MissionDesk — Combined the three nonprofit-facing tools above into a single AI-powered platform with its own product design. 🔗 View live demo

🎮 Terminal Wordle — Where it all started. A fully playable Wordle clone in Python.

I write on Substack to learn in public, breaking down AI safety concepts for people outside of tech, and documenting what it looks like to build a portfolio from scratch.

📝 The Scariest Problem in AI Isn't What You Think It Is — the alignment problem, explained through a genie, Tetris, and a factory full of paperclips

📝 I Built a Tool to Test AI Safety. Here's What Happened. — building SafeProbe and what it taught me about jailbreaking

📝 I Built an AI Tool for Refugees. My Mom Is the Reason Why. — why this work is personal

📝 I Combined My Three AI Tools Into One Product. Here's Why That Mattered. — building MissionDesk and learning to think in products, not scripts

Full archive: [(https://substack.com/@sumalees?r=8lnyl3&utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page)]

🎓 High school graduate with college experience and trade school 📜 Completing certificates in AI fluency and coding — Anthropic AI Fluency complete, Claude 101 complete 💼 Entrepreneur — started my own business 📈 Experience in day trading, graphic design, and web development 🌎 Daughter of a first-generation immigrant and Laotian refugee, with Thai and Caribbean roots on both sides of my family ⚡ Fast learner — I measure progress in days, not semesters

• Python for AI/ML development
• How large language models work under the hood
• AI safety concepts: alignment, red-teaming, Constitutional AI, scalable oversight
• Product thinking — building tools people actually want to use, not just scripts that work
• Anthropic's published research

This field doesn't have nearly enough women, and not enough women know yet what they're capable of building. I want to change that.

Women before me fought for the rights I have today. Black people before me fought for the rights I have today. My family fought to build a life in a country that owed them nothing. I am here because of that fight, and I intend to keep it going.

If you're a woman, a person of color, or anyone who's been told this field isn't for you: it is. I'm building proof of that, one project at a time. If I can do this without a CS degree, starting from nothing but curiosity, so can you.

I'm always open to connecting with people working in AI, safety research, nonprofit technology, or anyone building things that matter.

"The American dream isn't something you're handed. It's something you build, one hard day at a time." — What my mother showed me, without ever saying it