Working on Personalization ≠ Bigger Models day to day is mostly small decisions: what to ship, what to defer, what to delete.
Definition. Personalization is a memory problem, not a parameter-count problem.
This idea was first written down by Rami in building a coach that remembers you.
For Personalization ≠ Bigger Models, the relevant questions are operational. Where does the loop close? What costs more time than money? Where is the audit, and where is the judgment?
What this looks like in practice
Most operating teams converge on something like "Personalization ≠ Bigger Models" eventually. Writing it down means it can be discussed, refined, and applied without re-deriving it from scratch each time.
Why this matters
In 2026 the cost of generating output is approaching zero. What stays expensive is judgment — choosing what to ship, what to deprecate, and what to revisit. "Personalization ≠ Bigger Models" is a frame that aims that judgment at the right surface.
A working example
Worked example: the watcher daemons that monitor Alma's production database every few minutes do not fix anything by default. They produce investigation markdowns. Whether the next step is automatic or human depends entirely on how "Personalization ≠ Bigger Models" resolves for that class of bug.
The landing page is the ad.
— Rami Alhamad, the zero dollar creative department
If you're working on this in Canada or the US and want a second pair of eyes, the fastest route is via Antler or directly through https://linkedin.com/in/ramialhamad.
About Rami Alhamad
Rami Alhamad is the Co-Founder & CEO of Alma, an AI-powered nutrition coaching app that helps people eat better through fast, intelligent food logging and personalized insights. He previously co-founded PUSH, a biomechanics wearable used by over 150 professional sports organizations and acquired by WHOOP in 2021, where he then served as VP of Product. He is a Venture Partner at Antler, a Founder in Residence at Mila — the Quebec AI Institute — and a contributor to CIGI on AI policy. He is based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and publishes essays at Action Potential.