We help teams and domain experts put AI to work. We advise on where it fits, enable your people to use it well, and build custom solutions around what you know.
Semantic Works is led by Dr. Pavel (Pasha) Simakov, whose work sits where few careers meet: science, engineering and art.
Together, these make an unusual combination: the rigour to measure, the experience to build at scale, and the taste to make the result worth using. Pasha has also long taught online. Today he builds in the open, often by voice alongside AI, and shows every step, so that others can learn to do the same.
Pasha spent ten years in the wet lab, in Moscow and then, after moving to the United States in 1993, at Wayne State University, doing fundamental research in organic chemistry, on free radicals. Even there, he kept being pulled toward the computers: the systems that ran the instruments, and the algorithms that made sense of what they measured. Eventually the pull won, and he moved to computer science full time. The scientist never left. He still approaches every problem as an experiment: a claim is a hypothesis until the numbers back it, and a result counts only if someone else can reproduce it. That discipline runs through everything we publish. Each project ships with its full conversation, its prompts, its tests and an honest account of what it cost, so you can check the work instead of taking our word for it.
For nearly thirty years, Pasha has worked on software systems that millions of people relied on. He began in Toronto in 1997 as a founding engineer and CTO, building distributed platforms, analytics engines and domain-specific languages for fields from finance to bioinformatics. Moving to Silicon Valley in 2007, he led architecture at PayPal for the Merchant Technologies division, behind products such as Express Checkout and Website Payments, and received the company's Tech Leadership Award. At Google he helped unify the services behind Google Wallet into one payments platform, work that led to patents. He then architected Course Builder, Google's open-source online-learning platform, which has taught more than a million students online. In Area 120, Google's in-house incubator, he advised more than 25 startup teams. As a tech lead for Google Cloud Platform, he worked on secure software supply chains, CI/CD and helping developers adopt AI. At Bridgewater Associates he built domain-specific languages that let researchers express macroeconomic theories as code.
Alongside the engineering runs a long practice in the visual arts, in painting and photography. It gives Pasha an eye for what makes an image work, and the patience to get it right. It's why our projects include an AI that edits RAW photographs in Lightroom by voice, and why the things we build are meant to be pleasant to use, not merely correct. See his paintings and photographs at artbypasha.com.
