J’ai regardé L’Étranger avec Kushal.

J’ai beaucoup aimé le film. Il est lent, il laisse l’audience ressentir la beauté des décors marocains (le livre est à Alger mais le film tourne au Maroc), la mer en noir et blanc, les arbres et la plaine et le soleil et la chaleur qui tape les corps en sueur de nos élégants personnages.

Dans le livre de Camus j’ai trouvé la répétition parfois monotone du monologue intérieur fastidieuse. Dans le film, cette monotonie dans le langage disparaît, la répétition n’est pas dite mais nous est montrée et devient la douce succession des prises et une cinématographie plaisante, alors que le dialogue garde les moments forts de la prose de Camus — au moment de l’assassinat, et du dialogue avec l’aumônier.

Benjamin Voisin est très beau. Ses vêtements sont beaux, son regard, son corps. On le suit à travers Alger.

En regardant ce film j’ai eu une intense curiosité de comprendre ce personnage, comprendre la philosophie qui mène à ses dires et ses actions. Chaque parole chaque acte me donnait des indications qui parfois s’embrumaient. Et puis j’ai commencé à jouer, jouer avec mon idée de qui il était, jouer et m’enjouer quand il était clair que les questions qu’on lui posait allaient tomber à vide face à son entente du monde, la simplicité de certaines de ses réactions.

Son regard trahit une attention au monde, un désir de comprendre. J’ai un point faible pour les films où on voit les personnages aimer le monde avec leurs yeux. Il n’est pas touché par beaucoup des choses qui nous touchent, elles ne lui correspondent pas vraiment. La tristesse face à la mort de sa mère, l’amour, l’importance du mariage. Il n’en a rien à faire. Il sait qu’il n’en a rien à faire. Et il le dit.

C’est dur de réconcilier l’apparente distance qu’il a avec certaines choses, comme la souffrance des hommes, des animaux, avec l’attention avec laquelle il les regarde. La façon dont il voit le chien me donne envie de dire que la souffrance du chien l’affecte, mais elle ne l’affecte pas, c’est ma projection.

Mais il la reconnaît. Il voit la peine de M. Salamano, et l’invite chez lui pour l’ecouter. Pourquoi? Je ne suis pas sûr. Il n’est pas pris par la peine, mais peut-être qu’il veut passivement lui laisser place. Ou peut être qu’il veut juste plus rapidement en finir avec la distraction.

Le film me fait aimer Meursault. Malgré son manque d’empathie, le fait qu’il ne pâtit pas devant le mal du monde. Il voit, il regarde, le monde l’intéresse quand même. À part son assassinat, qu’il appelle un accident, il n’essaye pas de s’interposer face au monde, de lui faire du mal. Il ne veut pas grand-chose. Il voit son injustice face aux Arabes, il voit la douleur, et n’en fait rien mais ne demande rien non plus.

Par quoi Meursault nous est-il étranger? Faut-il avoir peur de l’étranger?

Je vois pourquoi certains ont peur de Meursault, par la légèreté avec laquelle il délaisse les bases, les instincts que l’on partage face à la douleur, l’émotion de l’autre. Mais je respecte son attention au monde, presque imperturbable. Malgré tout ce qui le rend étranger, j’aime le fait qu’il ne se sente pas lui-même étranger, qu’il continue de regarder et essaie de comprendre, qu’il déambule avec légèreté, chez lui, il regarde, il ressent, il se comporte dans une ouverture totale.

Je ne vois pas chez lui le manque d’idéal, le nihilisme total. Je vois un homme, un peu psychopathe, que j’aime aussi, qui vit sa vie, qui cherche à comprendre la vie et qui accepte ce qu’elle lui donne. Qui cherche par-dessus tout, sans compromis, à être vrai à soi-même, et ne pas se questionner quand il n’y a pas de question.

À cette aspiration il semble avoir une beaucoup plus grande facilité, une étrange facilité, par rapport au commun des mortels. Ses réactions sont simples, il vit dans un monde souvent dénué d’émotions trop complexes, de confusion ou de perte tant qu’il arrive à rejeter toutes les atteintes à cette paix, menées au nom de l’amour, d’un deuil forcé, et de Dieu. Il n’a qu’à dire, à chaque instant, la vérité à chaque question que lui pose le monde, chaque instant, et il trouvera son bonheur. Il me fait penser à un ami, qui lui aussi semble tres heureux.

Le dialogue avec l’aumônier est le moment capital ou les hommes tentent au plus fort d’assombrir la limpide clarté de sa vision. C’est la où Meursault s’émeut le plus, là où on voit cet autre homme essayer de l’attraper face à la mort, de l’encombrer avec des idées qu’il trouve fausses, face à la réalité des choses qu’il connaît encore pour peut-être si peu de vie. Cette scène est peut-être trop forte, une explosion d’émotions dans un film qui sinon ne laisse pas paraître sa justification.

Meursault voit les égarements du monde, il les comprend assez pour voir qu’on les brandit contre lui et pour les rejeter. Il comprend le racisme des Francais en l’Algérie, le ridicule du fait que son tribunal s’acharne sur sa relation avec mère alors qu’il a tué un homme, le vacarme des contradictions qu’il énonce dans ce dernier grand dialogue.

On a peut-être plus peur de l’homme qui cherche à voir mais ne ressent pas, que de l’homme qui détourne son regard. Ce n’est pas mon cas, je veux parler à l’homme qui me voit sans mon émoi, qui peut suivre les références de mes mots car elles sillonnent son pays, et qui pourtant ne veut pas y construire son palais. Je veux savoir ce qu’il a à me dire. Meursault voit beaucoup. Il voit la souffrance des hommes, leur injustice et leur racisme, plus encore que sa copine. Mais il ne la partage pas, et il ne comprend pas l’amour. C’est cette position étrange qu’il a, à moitié sur terre et à moitié au ciel (ou en enfer, selon le point de vue), qui fait qu’on trouve son regard sur nous si intéressant.

L’aumônier tente de lui parler, essaie de toucher son âme, mais on comprend que c’est l’inverse, que face à l’intelligence et l’adversité de Meursault, c’est l’aumônier qui a le cœur touché. Qui a peur lui, de cet étranger qui est de sa chair, qui marche dans son monde et qui a compris ce que c’est de pratiquer ses rites et pourtant qui les rejette, et qui semble presque y avoir trouvé plus sa place, plus de confort sur terre, que le religieux.

Qui est alors l’étranger ? L’homme anxieux avec qui tout le monde est d’accord ou celui qui seul au monde trouve sa paix ? Je ne veux pas être Meursault. Je ne veux pas perdre toutes ces choses qui rendent mon monde si complexe et riche. Je veux aimer. Je veux ressentir ta peine. Mais son monde à lui aussi est riche. Simple. J’aimerais me connaître tel qu’il se connaît, et dans cette connaissance pouvoir regarder le monde avec un tel manque de peur, avec une intention si pure d’y voir le réel et les choses vraies telles qu’elles sont.

In English

I watched The Stranger (2025) with some friends.

I really liked the film. It’s slow, it lets the audience feel the beauty of the Moroccan landscapes (the book is set in Algiers but the film was shot in Morocco), the sea in black and white, the trees and the plain and the sun and the heat that beats down on the sweating bodies of our elegant characters.

In Camus’s book, I found the sometimes monotonous repetition of the inner monologue tedious. In the film, this monotony of language disappears; the repetition is not spoken but shown to us, and becomes the gentle succession of shots and a pleasing cinematography, while the dialogue keeps the strongest moments of Camus’s prose — at the moment of the murder, and of the dialogue with the chaplain.

Benjamin Voisin is very beautiful. His clothes are beautiful, his gaze, his body. We follow him through Algiers.

Watching this film I had an intense curiosity to understand this character, to understand the philosophy behind his words and his actions. Each utterance, each act gave me clues that sometimes blurred over. And then I started to play, to play with my idea of who he was, to play and delight myself when it became clear that the questions being asked of him would fall flat against his understanding of the world, the simplicity of his reactions.

His gaze betrays an attention to the world, a desire to understand. I have a soft spot for films where you see characters loving the world with their eyes. He isn’t moved by many of the things that move us; they don’t really speak to him. The sadness of his mother’s death, love, the importance of marriage. He doesn’t care. He knows he doesn’t care. And he says so.

It’s hard to reconcile the apparent distance and apparent attention he has towards things like the suffering of men and animals. The way he looks at the dog makes me want to say that the dog’s suffering affects him, but it doesn’t, that’s my projection.

But he recognizes it. He sees M. Salamano’s grief, and invites him over to listen to him. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe he just wants to be done with the distraction more quickly.

The film makes me like Meursault. Despite his lack of empathy, the fact that he doesn’t suffer in the face of the world’s evil. He sees, he watches, the world interests him all the same. Apart from his murder, which he calls an accident, he doesn’t try to disturb the world, to harm it. He doesn’t want much. He sees its injustice toward Arabs, he sees the pain, and does nothing about it but asks nothing of it either.

In what way is Meursault a stranger to us? Should we be afraid of the stranger?

I see why some people fear Meursault, for the lightness with which he abandons the basic instincts we share in the face of pain, of another’s emotion. But I respect his attention to the world, almost imperturbable. Despite everything that makes him a stranger, I love that he doesn’t feel like a stranger to himself, that he keeps watching and trying to understand, that he wanders lightly, at home in himself, he watches, he feels, he behaves with total openness.

I don’t see in him a lack of ideals or a total nihilism. I see a man, a bit of a psychopath, who lives and tries to understand and accept what life gives him. Who seeks above all, without compromise, to be true to himself, and not to question himself when there is no question to ask.

For this aspiration he seems to have a much greater ease, a strange ease. His reactions are simple, he lives in a world often free of complex emotion, of confusion or loss — as long as he manages to reject the assaults on this peace, waged in the name of love, of forced mourning, and of God. He need only speak, at every moment, the truth to every question the world asks him, every moment, and he will find his happiness. He reminds me of a friend who also usually seems quite happy.

The dialogue with the chaplain is the pivotal moment where the men in the movie try most forcefully to dim the limpid clarity of his vision. It’s where Meursault is moved most, where we see this other man trying to grab hold of him in the face of death, to burden him with ideas he finds false, against the reality of the things Meursault knows for what is perhaps so little life left. This scene is perhaps too strong, an explosion of emotions in a film that otherwise doesn’t show its justification. Meursault sees the world’s missteps, he understands them well enough to see that they are being wielded against him, and to reject them. He understands the racism of the French in Algeria, the absurdity of his court fixating on his relationship with his mother when he has killed a man, and all the din of contradictions he lays out in this final great dialogue.

We are perhaps more afraid of the man who seeks to see but does not feel, than of the man who looks away. But I want to talk to the man who sees me without my emotion, who can follow the references of my words because they mark the fields of his same country, and who nonetheless does not want to build his palace on them. I want to know what he has to say to me. Meursault sees a great deal. He sees the suffering of men, their injustice and their racism, even more than his girlfriend does. But he does not share in it, and he does not understand love. It’s this strange position he holds, half on earth and half in heaven (or in hell, depending on your point of view), that makes us find his gaze upon us so interesting.

The chaplain tries to speak to him, tries to touch his soul, but we understand it’s the opposite, that in the face of Meursault’s intelligence and resistance, it’s the chaplain whose heart is touched. Who is afraid himself, of this stranger who is of his own flesh, who walks in his world and has understood what it is to practice his rites and yet rejects them, and who seems almost to have found more of his place there, more comfort on earth, than the religious man.

Who then is the stranger? The anxious man with whom everyone agrees, or the one who alone in the world finds his peace? I don’t want to be Meursault. I don’t want to lose all the things that make my world so complex and rich. I want to love. I want to feel your pain. But his world too is rich. Simple. I would like to know myself the way he knows himself, and in that knowledge be able to look at the world with such a lack of fear, with such a pure intention to see real and true things as they are.

In San Francisco tonight I peer at the back of your face and hold your waist tighter, but you barely notice, because you are subjugated by the music onstage. My eyes flicker from your face to the lit up guitars and the intricate displays of light. In between songs the singer begins to talk. He holds the key to our heart then. He is the star, the prim provider of our affect. But tonight he does not want to be prim, he wants to speak with more than his music, he grabs the mic in silence and surprises us, douses us in his own human incongruity and utters nonsensical jokes about San Francisco, Guy Fieri, and vegans, and then begins to sing again. The music comes, and I forget the jokes; I let his voice boom through my heart; I am lost to it; my neck shivers; my face makes motions of anguish which I cannot stop. I like it, like the body moving to the drums, the face captivated now as I listen and my hand receives the motion of your body, the shrieks of your attentive heart.

The pupils dilate. The light recedes. My eyes close and the world splits to darkness, and then to colors which I cannot cast into words. It is immediate. No thought then of the memory, the words to tell of it, or the theory to be made.

Yet I speak to you now in words, and gesture to unrealizable concepts, ideas hidden from the everyday, which I can master with the same ardor one might use to masticate a cut of meat. I have spent much time dutifully masticating in the domain of concepts. Saying true things I could have said nowhere else. But also at times failing to speak beyond the concepts, failing to speak in a rawer language. I have spent time considering how to choose concepts, how to choose how to choose concepts, writing about how to choose how to choose concepts, and many other such recursive questions far from the reality of a man’s daily life.

I have also feared concepts, and the words that gesture at them. I have felt the facility with which a universe can be reduced to syllables, oh so terribly silently, without anyone noticing. How easy it is to disengage by giving something a name or a story. she loved him till he realized he did not. she worked for money. the boys failed because they did not know the word of beauty. I have known the dreadful facility with which a man can be put into a box with no holes but a monochrome definition. I have seen our simplifications replace the world, replace the tessellations, the marvelous texture that makes the rugged skin of our universe but is the first to smooth away to time.

Over the past year I noticed my own failure to capture the texture. Last fall my acting teacher told me to observe and act like a turtle. I looked at it for an hour in the park, and then tried my best to emulate the way the legs awkwardly entrap the lettuce, how the forward legs slowly paddle in conjunction with the rear, the squeaking noise of alarm sometimes from the mouth, and the speed with which the flesh unequivocally retracts into the shell. Indifference turned to care, as I read David Foster Wallace describe with vivid detail real and imagined worlds, and I learned to appreciate the inane beauty of two athletes moving balls across a green court. As I prepared to leave college, I stared at the worn walls of that old house, textured in paintings, zany posters, and books that sign the hidden trajectory of older souls. I remember bashfully glimpsing the chains dangling from the ceiling of the living room, only months after I started living there. I remember the skin of those hands I held once, more webbed, less sharp than mine. I remember the face of that girl in that class, lighting up always with joy and kindness when called on but dispirited right after, if your gaze lingered on her expression just a bit longer than she’d expect.

But still your heart was hidden to me, for no fault of yours. I would catch another glimpse and then go cold, protect myself in words that could explain away your face, contorted then with affect, whispering and bereft. je vais partir. tu te caches. I let words and stories slip over your body like turgid slime, starting at the feet all the way to the mouth and head, covered up finally until all I could hear was a caricature interspersed with moments of your raw song, piercing through and making me wonder, but not enough to stave off tragedy.

In the past few months I understood what kept me apart. I learned that we are transformed by the things that we choose to pay most attention to. I learned that there is a boy who fears that transformation and its consequences. That boy, I think, really loves the world. He is maybe a few years younger than me, maybe not. He often spends his time thinking. His vivid imagination allows him sometimes to imagine a whole world of possible lives, forking paths in the mind’s eye drawn as far as the mind can imagine. They are pretty, at times astoundingly large, but never as large as the world in front of him. And sometimes at night he thinks of them, and their beauty, and the death of the beauty. He thinks himself into failure and a certain flavor of anxious fear. And when he finds himself at the climax, when he most wants to give himself to the world, his fear deafens the overwhelming vastness of his heart.

I learned something from this boy. He taught me how to think. His mistakes taught me after a while when not to think. When to jump. When to stop writing about what it takes to jump. The vastness of the world. A hint at the vastness of the heart. The boy is not here now, but if he was, I would tell him more on the depth of seeing and how it transforms. He would tell me that he knows these things, and I would tell him that he does not. I would tell him what he fails to see, tell him to try now to stare without caution and go beyond thought to reach the heart. He will not listen, he will look at me with the same baffled, curious, unserious attitude he had when he read that Zen book his dad recommended, that talked about swinging doors and limitless worlds contained by ideas of the self. But he will live and learn. It will take him time. Pain will find his heart and be his great teacher, and then it will leave him freer than he was.

1

Taste of cherry is a movie about a man, Badii, driving around Teheran, looking for someone to help him kill himself. Why? We don’t know. He wants them to check in on him, the following day after he attempts to takes his life, check in on this body in this hole he has made next to a cherry tree. If he is alive he wants to be pulled out, and if not he should be buried.

Why does he want to die? We do not know.

In an interview, Abbas Kiarostami says that his favorite movies do not overwhelm the viewer. He seeks a movie that the viewer could nap to, and yet find themselves thinking and feeling for weeks because of it.

This movie has that slowness to it that might put some to sleep. But when I watched it I was struck. And I find myself thinking of it, now, 2 years after, and rewatching it 2 weeks ago. Taste of cherry is one of the first movies that made me serious about movies. That heightened my bar for what a movie could make me feel, and how much I should pay attention to a movie. To what it is trying to give me. To the lives behind its frames.

This movie mostly follows Badii as he drives, finding people to drive around in his car, begging them to help him end his life. The frames are simple. The day slowly rises and fades into night. The colors are pretty. But Badii demands attention.

He stares at the world with a deep attention. The attention of someone who is desperately looking. Looking for an ending. But that’s something we learn at the start of the movie. What we realize throughout is that his stare yearns for connection. He is truly seeing these people, trying to understand them, understand where they come from, who they are, what animates them, and only then asking of them one thing: that they help him end his life.

— You’ve never seen a gravedigger?
— No, never.
— I’m not a gravedigger.
— I don’t bury people.
— I know you’re not a gravedigger. If I’d wanted one, I’d have fetched one.
It’s you I need. You’re like my son.
Help me.

He wants to end his life with the help of someone he feels connection to. Not a gravedigger. He is hesitant, afraid, unsure of whether or not he should be saved. He drives around this solemn landscape alone, and encounters these characters, the Kurdish soldier. The seminarist. The old Turkish taxidermist. He seeks to understand their lives. Not just for his sake. But because he believes in doing so.

The dialogues are simple. Oscillating to Badii. Oscillating to the face of the visitor he has invited to his car. Kiarostami, actually was in the back of the car, observing all the interactions as they were filmed. The camera emphasize the faces. Gives them the time. Lets them roll against the beautiful arid landscape.

The attention with which Badii stares at their faces is beautiful. But it is not pure. It is self-interested. It comes from an intense need for relief. A very human need to escape a deep pain. Badii is desperate for a cure. Not necessarily suicide, but he needs help. He needs to be seen, but he also feels like he cannot be understood. He refuses to be, his pain is too complex, too rich, too intense. He tells the taxidermist his pain cannot be understood, and we never hear his story. But we see how he is struck by the lives he draws from the road. How he wishes they could deliver him of his suffering.

On my first watch I viewed Badii as a kind character lost in desperation. I still do. But on my second watch I saw more of his dark side. How his desperation causes him to denigrate the very people he seeks to connect with. How he tries to use his wealth and power to pressure a young boy into helping him die, or how he refutes the young and idealistic seminarist because of how much he wants to be done.

Badii watches the world from a place of deep need. The acuity of this need makes him see these faces as the only thing that can free him, with a raw intensity of observation. The intensity is a testament to how precious, that connection, that life is. But its source is destructive. At times, Badii respects the people and the cherries he is given insofar as they are his only exit from his own hell, and so he is willing to use them. To try and force them down his throat.

But we love him, for how much he tries to understand them, so close to death, and yet so much more attentive to life than so many of us. And so we can love him in his suffering, his vulnerability. With the taxidermist, who agrees to help him, he is much softer. They agree on the deal, and he drops him off, and then rushes back and bothers him at his job, to talk to him, again, and ask simply: How are you.

He aims to share another moment with this man, this taxidermist who has just begged him to change his mind and choose to stay alive. The taxidermist tells him of mulberries, of his own struggle with suicide. Of how precious life is. And Badii is afraid. He wants to cling to it, he is hesitant, he asks the taxidermist to make sure he is alive, to throw a stone, two, three maybe, and save him the next morning if he moves.

That fear of death comes back at the same moment Badii most intensely feels he can connect to the taxidermist. Feels some immense desire to see and to be seen, to get to know this man who will help him die, who needs the money he is offered to heal his daughter, who cares enough to listen and wants him to survive.

I have never had suicidal thoughts. I have walked the world sometimes, and looked at people’s faces, and wondered at what lay behind them. I have looked with a savage intensity at their faces. I kept looking. I looked at new faces. I tried to really see. I found them beautiful.

But I also looked at them because I wanted something. I needed something, I was hungry. Hungry for the taste of cherries. hungry to feel and to be felt in the same way.

I could call that partial cause for the attention impure, selfish, undeserving of the beauty of the gaze itself, of the face which graces it. But I am not sure, nowadays, if that notion of purity is useful.

I feel that this need is very human. Maybe not enlightened, but human. We are brought to the other as an observer, an appreciative observer. We are brought to them because we lack something, and that lack makes us open and so sensitive to who they are.

And then maybe it is with that which is observed, as we stop watching and begin playing, that we can break that hunger, taste the cherry and feel whole again, holding on still to that marvelous appreciation of what it is to stare at someone, stare at their dilated eyes and try to understand who they are. Try to learn their beauty without reducing it to our satisfaction.

I was so fed up with it that I decided to end it all.
One morning, before dawn, I put a rope in my car.
My mind was made up, I wanted to kill myself.
I set off for Mianeh. This was in 1960.
I reached the mulberry tree plantations.
I stopped there. It was still dark.
I threw the rope over a tree but it didn’t catch hold.
I tried once, twice but to no avail.
So then I climbed the tree and tied the rope on tight.
Then I felt something soft under my hand. Mulberries.
Deliciously sweet mulberries.
I ate one. It was succulent, then a second and third.
Suddenly, I noticed that the sun was rising over the mountaintop.
What sun, what scenery, what greenery!
All of a sudden, I heard children heading off to school.
They stopped to look at me.
They asked me to shake the tree.
The mulberries fell and they ate.
I felt happy.
Then I gathered some mulberries to take them home.
My wife was still sleeping.
When she woke up, she ate mulberries as well.
And she enjoyed them too.
I had left to kill myself and I came back with mulberries.
A mulberry saved my life.

• The taxidermist in the Taste of cherry

I wrote a letter this year about 2025. It's about acceleration, poetry, how it's been the most eventful year of my life, and how I am excited and scared for the future.

Letter

I want to tell you a story about 2025. As I bump along today and approach 21 on into the new year, in a van riding from Burgundy to Paris, and I stare at the small hills, the snow inscribed against the mud like frosted chocolate, extending down into the highway and then melting over into the warm grass on the south side -- I feel an urge to share with you, share this feeling flaring in my spine, of sitting and eating the bread of my youth and imagining it and its associated customs withering in my mouth, I feel an urge to imagine now the world hidden up against the stars, the whole earth green, or black, studded with steel platforms, imagine now what it might feel like for us to live there and what we might hold on to in that place.

I want to tell you a story about the world, about my life, and maybe yours, about 2025, about silicon wafers arranged like helices all the way up into the sky, about the mountains that rise higher where men are made, and the rivers and the cities and how this is the year I’ve gone through change at a pace to match that of the world’s, finally just about a simple boy, learning to be not so simple, learning to imagine a world we might be happy to live in, as we rush along an era of transformation started before his years.

It starts in January, in Boston, where many stories seem to start but rarely end. It starts, again with the snow, lying in heaps on the river Charles where it covers the ice and then the water. I am on the 11th floor of an office, not having seen much sunlight or colors really, and staring at this pure and clear stripe of white cutting between Boston and Cambridge, and it entices me. So I go down there and onto one of the bridge crossing it, and it is night-time now, and I stare at the expanse and throw a little ball of icy snow with all the weight carried into my arm and shoulder, and watch it land and crack and slide meters out into the distance. The year is begun.

Deepseek has just released their cheaper reasoning models, starting an internet craze. Reasoning models are on my mind. My friends and I have visions of scale. Of inference time compute measured in human years, and what it might mean for the world, when these robot minds can run faster than our flesh, and what humans can build to keep observing that reality. We began to broaden our horizons, narrow our selves into the shapes that might bring us answers. We worked hard, till the late hours of the night in those offices, and then we drove in the snowy suburbs and kept thinking.

How can we measure the long horizon abilities of models as they complete tasks with more and more turns, and memory schemes, and agent orchestration, etc...? METR later released a good answer to this, and in the meantime we worked on ours. How can we allow models to mediate their own oversight? We wrote a whole paper just in January about training models to legibly represent systems in natural language. But then the ice started to crack beneath our feet, and when we looked underneath to see what was there, we found a bigger, noisier world to grab our attention.

I was frustrated last year. I was working hard but failing to find my meaning. I was looking for a change. I had another free month before my 6th semester at MIT, doing an exchange in Paris, and I decided to travel and do research. But first I went to Taiwan to contemplate the Earth and its transformations up in the mountains. I taught curious highschoolers about neural networks. I wrote and considered what aesthetics will bring about the future. I talked about dreams, and we sat on wooden sheep and stared at the wisps against the rocks and imagined their shapes solidified. I went to Taipei, tasted sweet potato and sesame and for a few hours felt the city move as I followed its slanted curve and its people told me about their worries at the top of an abnormally large tower looking down on the world, an edge jutting out into the sky, nestled between forest and concrete.

And then the time was up again, and I kept moving. I went to Japan, this time excited to have no purpose and less friends. I met and travelled with new people, across Osaka and its silent castles at night, into Nara and its garden of sitting rocks and deer. What a beautiful world. I raced to Kyoto, and then biked across to the bamboo forest at its outskirts. The bamboos rose like poles layering the darkness, towering above me as if wrapping against my own wobbly limbs. Kyoto is special. The bikers oscillate between the road and the sidewalk, the ground lurches up onto the hills and the temples, where you can look out onto the whole city and its river. It is quiet and more soothing than Tokyo. In a sento (artificial hotspring) I went to with a man from Austria, I met a Frenchman, and then a man from Hong Kong, and then Vietnam, and obviously the Japanese. In English, broken Japanese, and French, we talked about the places we were from, and what people liked to do there, all of us sitting naked, the water opening up our pores and minds.

New AI models came out, optimized for tool use, as did research on the reliability of model reasoning (OpenAI, Anthropic). What affordances do we have to understand the reasoning and process of the machines we gradually outsource our labor to? And then, what levers can allow us to keep our institutions and values in sway? Gradual disempowerment pondered how humanity could go out softly with a whimper, under the roiling mass of a world optimized by creatures we no longer understand. No longer human. In Hakone, I met a kind stranger who brought me to the most beautiful hotspring and brought me from cold water to hot and then to cold again, and I felt oh so very human. And grateful. And then it was time to leave, this time for San Francisco. On the plane I read No Longer Human about a man who failed to convince himself of his own humanity, and lived his life as an unending self sabotage. Its extremity moved me and urged me towards openness.

After going to Japan in search of beauty and silence, California was to find unrest, find the coals for a fire that could host our ideas as we jumped away from college and into the living machine of AI. We spent our days ubering or waymoing across its hills, meeting all kinds of organic and artificial lives: the entrepreneurs walking on the quicksand of an ever changing industry, the AI researchers seeking talent, the worried policy advocates and all the rest forming a diffuse mass that simply represented our unknown future staring down at us, as if 1000 doors had suddenly opened without us having time to look through them. We did a hackathon, organized by a company in the business of distilling human flesh into data and into intelligence, and we called our project beluga, and did research on how allowing reasoning models to use explicit programmatic abstractions boosted their ability to search and plan in combinatorial games. We worked till the lack of sleep made us stupid, and resolved to go up a mountain if we won. We were out and about at the edge. I got closer to some of the city’s people, who had held on their maybe naive seeming love of the world, but also knew the rules of the game being played here.

Finally, the plane was boarding again, this time to France. I was to spend a few months there again, the longest since I left for college at 17, and study at one of its schools as I enjoyed the city and a change of pace, and figured out what I wanted to work on. But SF had already given me fire to work with, and I was half way there. I wanted to see if I would live there. Paris is my favorite place to walk, along the quays, staring across at the gilded buildings and ancient amulets of a world now basking in its own glory. In Paris I felt again how much people could appreciate their lives, without necessarily doing anything, as I walked all along and ate the best breads, and met people who understood me and where I came from, and watched with them new movies that moved me. After my americanized life, Paris elicited old dimensions that I missed, my affinity for an intellectual heritage that had been reified, that was clean and orderly and delineated, with its catalogue of white and red Gallimard books, and its vast vocabulary of reference and images, often springing out of nowhere like a flood, and the lyricality of its poems. I felt the ease with which a man can jump into abstractions, when in Paris. And I hold on to all of these dearly, but Paris is not the time or place for me just now. Maybe in a few years, but right now it is too closed to me, too slow to catch up. Keats declares mastering and holding negative capability - having the ability to live with contradictions, is the mark of a first class man. 2025 I learned to do that a bit more than in the past. One of my dearest friends gave me A Moveable Feast, by Hemingway, and it accompanied me as I walked along the city, and wrote and ran experiments in its gardens, my favorite being the Luxembourg gardens that were the crib of my youth, as I watched its cute toy boats dawdling along the fountains.

I was also surprisingly alone, sometimes, in my school, being the only exchange student, only man with long blond locks in a crowd of well shaved and trimmed men who were deep in a culture I could no longer monomaniacally commit to, who had been reared to the rhythm of the prep schools and the importance of their culture and their accomplishment. But I greeted my loneliness, except insofar as it felt like a failure, and I read and explored and worked quite hard. In March, right before we were submitting a paper, our research machine was accidentally destroyed, and we all scrambled to recover all our plots in time for the deadline. I was beyond myself that night, but in the end we made it work, and I fell sick for a while. I had some unresolved tension with Paris and its people, and these months allowed me to heal my way through it, but not without difficulty. I feel like I can raise my head higher now, and stare at these cultures with clarity. I am excited to move forward, without forgetting the world to be made and the world that stands heavy and complete before me. Again, what a beautiful world, and what a beautiful thing to live the spring in Paris, when the trees in the park regain their leaves and walking in the night feels softer, how pleasant to walk the night across the water and go climbing in the rain.

In May, I felt called to San Francisco. I called Kaivu many times, and we talked about our research ideas, what we wanted to put into the world, meta science, quantum mechanics, natural evolution and the process of science, and considered where we wanted to do our best work. We both felt ready to put our soul into something. We decided machine learning is a soil science, and the problems we want to solve need data, need to engage with the roiling mass of human society and activity and markets. It was time to start an expedition.

I flew there. Maybe because of how different and special each place I visited was for me this year, each flight was a condensation of intensity, as I recalled and prepared for my next leap forward. I furiously jotted down in my notebook, what I felt from Paris, and what I wanted to make in San Francisco. For the summer, I moved in with a group of friends in a house we called tidepool. We learned the best orders at in-n-out, we went to Tahoe, and some of us started companies. We talked about the city, about machine learning and what we wanted to work on. It was a good time. It was my first time living in San Francisco. The nature is beautiful, the air is rife with anticipation, but it is also sometimes a bit too much. The city was torn by rampant inequality, and people struggling to keep control of their own limbs, faster than the other people trying to build them new ones. I am wary of its digital fetishization, fetishization of the things that I am close to. I am wary of when things become performance rather than play, and warier even when the play concerns the design of intelligent machines, as playful as they are.

Starting a company is a great challenge, and being in San Francisco is a great place to learn how to do it. We learned about what kinds of products and trades happen in Silicon Valley, and how we could fit our ideas into products into those gaps. Doing research well seems to be about picking some important portion of reality, and closing in on it ruthlessly, always asking yourself which of your assumptions is the weakest, and then making it real. But you can mostly choose your object and reorient very fast, because your environment is quite simple, you and the science. But in a company there is an insane amount of inputs -- customers, investors, what people want, your brand, who is talking about you, etc... and every day there are 10000 things you could do to interact with all these players and you need to pick the strategy. Both of them require the same ruthlessness and attention to detail, and this year has taught me about both. I am learning to love this place.

Many things in life require a great deal of conviction. For most of my life I have been able to pull through because of my natural endless supply of curiosity and fascination with the world. But sometimes that is not enough, because that love is not always sharp enough to discriminate. This year, I made progress in choosing. Maybe because starting a company can be so stressful, and requires so much belief, I was forced into reckoning with my uncertainties and committing to what had to be done, if I wanted to do anything at all. One day in the summer I went to Land’s End, a beautiful place on the coast of SF, near golden gate park, with a friend from Boston and we stared at the waves crashing into the rocks, and in the floating sunlight as the wind crashed through our hair we talked about reason and emotion, about learning to listen and not suppress your gut telling you what you really want to do. In 2025, I am getting better at listening to it, before someone else tries to force-implant me an artificial one.

Fulcrum worked out of our house, alternating days of furious coding and then vagabonding across the city. I started using Claude Code around end of May for a hackathon, and was amazed. Anthropic’s release brought agents from the domain of research into practice, and I began driving them daily. As I worked on our products, I thought about how humans might interact with agents, and what kinds of technology could leverage the asymmetric abilities of humans and AIs. How to delegate, and orchestrate models, and what infrastructure might allow us to distribute our labor beyond our current capacity for attention. Based on these, I built a few open source prototypes on the future of coding. We also made a system to precisely observe and understand both what your AI model is doing, and what your evals are measuring. Understanding evals is the place to start with model oversight, ie using models to understand and control other models. We had many hesitations on what could work, and what kind of company we could build, but we laid the seeds of our now firm conviction. We got resources, gathered more people, and are building the ship to carry us up into the stars. This year, we publicly launched our evaluations tool and platform for running and debugging agent systems. We will be releasing much more soon. We want to build the technology the future will need, with full freedom, and the people we love working with. I am very happy about it, and hope we can execute on the ideas that will matter. In the nights, which were often short, due to the incessant ambulances and noise of our neighborhood, I often wrote, or read. I read The Road, and enjoyed its short prose that jumped to evocative and airy images, and built up a wasteland of cannibals and hunger and the nature dying with the men, as a child and his father make their way through the defunct continent.

I took a cab one day from San Francisco to Berkeley to meet some customers, and the driver was a man named Augustine from Nigeria. I chatted with him for the whole ride, and he told me about how he came to America in 1991, how he was shipped off to marry someone, how the valley has changed and grown colder, and how when he first came here he went to the park and sat in the dirt and imagined spirits, urging him on, giving him a strength that carried all the lives of the dead and living who make their bread in that place. He gave me advice for my new life. He told me to keep going on as I was, and urged ominously that I should make sure to remember him in my paradise.

In the fall I alternated between SF and Boston, having to wrap up some final responsibilities of my time as a student. I visited pika, the house in which I’ve been living for the past while and that I moved out of in January 2025. Pika is a miracle of coordination - feeding everyone with a public mealplan where people cook together, which I ran in January, and providing them with a warm, well organized home I was very glad to call mine. I will miss my late nights there eating snacks with other pikans, and watching movies in the basement, or cooking for all my friends. I also revisited East Campus, my other home at MIT. I danced with my friends there, I looked at my old room, I got nostalgic. I will remember the dreamy warmth of these communities, their openness, the way they have the agency of SF without the single-mindedness, the machine shops where someone with dyed hair is always up building something new, maybe a radio system, a motorized shopping cart, a new LED display for the parties. These places made me, and I will carry them with me. I said my goodbyes. I went climbing again, with another friend from Boston, and we talked about writing and poetry, about why we wrote, about abstractions and whether they had their place in art, whether a poem has to be constructed or felt, written for yourself or for others, and then we kept climbing. I read Valéry. The same friend gave me the book Oblivion by David Foster Wallace, and its stories inspired me with their detail, the attention given to worlds that could not exist, that were conjured as precisely as if describing some kind of ridiculous, absurd alternate reality, that had been felt and lived. I paid more attention to things, and tried to write things that were more concrete. I went to a play that inspired me, and I started paying more attention to people and their faces, and the way I moved my own body.

In December, we launched our latest products, finalized decisions for the research internship we are running in January, and shipped all of our final remaining belongings from Boston to SF, as well as getting a new office. We have learned so much this year, and we are excited to show you what we can do.

I have deep gratitude for 2025. It was a year of great joys and great pains — a year like dark metal, melted and annealed again and again, moving from fluid to form and into strength. Its transformations etched a whole world into me. The forge keeps hammering. 2026 has begun, and we live in a period of rapid change.

I hope we remember each other in our assorted paradises, whatever pain or joy they bring us.

Lists of the year

Writing

I wrote more this year! I have two substacks now, one for technical takes and one for more personal writing.

Subscribe now

I did some technical writing, for/with fulcrum and on my own:

• Dense reconstruction is the scaffold of machine learning on generalization and what we can learn in ML

• AI agents and painted facades on evals and model oversight [fulcrum]

• Personalization requires data

• AI takes some thoughts and predictions from May

More personal essays and poetry:

• Machine has no mouth and it must scream

• 2024 in review

• l imit [poetry]

• into the unknown

• out and about at the edge

• emulsion [poetry]

• what do you see now?

I also wrote a few more poems I haven’t put up yet. I hope to keep writing in balance with my work.

Things I want to write about, if you’re interested:

• Alignment as capabilities

• Personalization and gradual disempowerment

• Emotions as integrators

• Concreteness and abstraction in writing

• Towards an aesthetics for cyborgs

And other things, I’m sure.

Books

Great

• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

• Twice Alive by Forrest Gander

• Oblivion by David Foster Wallace

• The Road by Cormac McCarthy

• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Good

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone

• Talking at the Boundaries by David Antin

• The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies

• On the Motion and Immobility of Douve by Yves Bonnefoy

• No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

• The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

• Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

Check out my goodreads for more info, I will review some of these soon. I had a lot of hits this year!

Movies

Also on letterboxd.

Great

• Paths of Glory

• Certified Copy

• Ma nuit chez Maud

• La collectionneuse

• Synecdoche New York

Good

• Parasite

• Betty Blue

• Wake up dead man

• Perfect Blue

• The color of pomegranates

Okay

• I, Tonya

• The cabinet of Dr Caligari

Links

In random order:

• https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

• https://rowanhuang.com/takes/2025/03/08/capitalism.html

• https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6442/the-art-of-biography-no-5-robert-caro

• https://nabeelqu.co/on-reading-proust

• https://beatinpaths.com/2024/09/13/the-great-american-novel-project-explained/

• https://writetobrain.com/olfactory

• https://reactionwheel.net/2024/09/resignation-letter.html

Mildly Bemused Respect

Some Victorious Answer

I For a long time now, everyone in SF has been talking about agency. This was the case even before AI came along and gave the term an extra layer of importance. Agency in SF means blue blood, grace, election. An agent is a thing which can self-reflect so much that nothing is taken as given. Only an agent can achieve the extraordinary, because only an age…

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9 months ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · will maclean

• https://www.goodfire.ai/blog/you-and-your-research-agent

• https://si.inc/posts/the-heap/

• https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qVFDW8qT4CC4E_2TSVevrDbZ_Z9Utu_I1z0-ISLwZts/edit?slide=id.g37403db1f39_0_96#slide=id.g37403db1f39_0_96

• https://gwern.net/ai-daydreaming

• https://calv.info/openai-reflections

skin contact

21 observations from people watching

Painting weddings for a few years now, I have spent a fair bit of time observing strangers move through a room. Seeing someone new, I always have a feeling of noticing their internal architecture. I did not realize that some people do not feel this way, at least not as intensely…

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a year ago · 11674 likes · 381 comments · shani

• https://assets.stripeassets.com/fzn2n1nzq965/2pt3yIHthraqR1KwXgr98U/b6301040587a62d5b6ef7b76c904032d/Stripe-annual-letter-2024.pdf

Knowingless

bye, mom

I get a text that my mom’s in the ICU…

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5 months ago · 1643 likes · 166 comments · Aella

• https://www.warrenzhu.com/sentences/

Noahpinion

The AI bust scenario that no one is talking about

I’ve actually already written a number of posts about the possibility of an AI bubble and bust. Back in August, I wondered if the financing of data centers with private credit could cause a financial crisis if there was a bust. I followed that up with…

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5 months ago · 510 likes · 112 comments · Noah Smith

• https://www.yudhister.me/intentional-hobbling/

• https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/c-p-snow-the-two-cultures

bookbear express

Is friendship romantic?

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in Bathtub…

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5 months ago · 70 likes · 1 comment · Ava

• https://substack.com/home/post/p-179505702

Madeleine Song

LEAVE YOUR BOYFRIEND: a short story

They were in her bed watching tv on her ipad when a notification from Hinge popped up on the screen. Jason sent you a rose…

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a year ago · 53 likes · 21 comments · Madeleine Song

Numb at the Lodge

Numb at Burning Man

They arrested Praskovya Petrovna on a beautiful rosy spring morning in 1933, while she was waiting at Moskovsky Station in Leningrad. They asked to see her internal passport, and she said that her husband had it. She’d been standing with the luggage while he went to chase down one of the station comrades about something or other; he could never get thro…

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6 months ago

• https://voxpopulisphere.com/2024/10/25/zbigniew-herbert-the-envoy-of-mr-cogito/

• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52171/orpheus-alone-56d2306dd3444

• https://substack.com/home/post/p-150188028?source=queue Reflections on palantir

• https://www.warrenzhu.com/hci/2025/09/22/homo-faber-or-what-i-want-to-do.html

• https://nautil.us/when-einstein-tilted-at-windmills-236253/

• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JH6tJhYpnoCfFqAct/the-company-man

• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/deaf-republic

a slice of my mind

ALIGNMENT

the first time we met, you told me how the rest of your life would play out. align the current language models (make sure they behave in line with human values), then use them to supervise the AGI, then use the AGI to build superintelligence. you declared that the purpose of your life was alignment research…

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10 months ago · 109 likes · 20 comments · vincent huang

• https://www.gleech.org/rats-and-trads

• https://www.leonardtang.me/blog/turning-23

• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47553/meditation-at-lagunitas

• https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html

Fantastic Anachronism

The Alchemist and His Quicksilver

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life…

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a year ago · 3 likes · Alvaro de Menard

• https://yuxi-liu-wired.github.io/essays/posts/cyc/

Numb at the Lodge

Born in the wrong generation

It’s a bright cloudless day and you’re meeting your beautiful submissive girlfriend for a breakfast date. You’re meeting her at the soda fountain. You’re meeting her at the ice cream parlour. You’re meeting her at the drugstore to share a malted milk. You’ve been going steady with your main squeeze and now you’re meeting her at the folksy chrome-and-cre…

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a year ago · Sam Kriss

• https://joecarlsmith.com/2020/11/22/the-impact-merge

• https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/02/please-dont-throw-your-mind-away.html

• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge

• https://www.deseret.com/2022/8/22/23309244/cole-summers-died-newcastle-utah-warren-buffett-charlie-munger-bari-weiss-unschooled/

• https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/learning-how-to-be-a-human-being-not-a-human-doing/

• https://topos.institute/blog/2024-08-27-plausible-fiction/

• https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/05/arts/music-an-instant-fan-s-inspired-notes-you-gotta-listen.html

• https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/winston-churchills-dream-1947/

• https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/movarec-s-paradox

• https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-my-life/

• Finite games where the goal is to win on a finite time horizon.

• Infinite games where the goal is to keep contributing to the indefinite play of the game itself. For example, art, scientific discovery, humanism, etc...

When I discovered this dichotomy in high-school I resolved to play infinite games. To find and fight for the beautiful ideals in this world. To shout from the past and into the future – here I lay a small piece of this rich tapestry! I see what you have done and put down this stroke for all that you will do!

But I have noticed in the way people practice everything from philosophy to ai or even math – that the finite often comes clamping down on ideas of infinity – researchers fold to academic pressures and compromise on the quality of their work to get grants, artists get stuck in bubbles that make it hard for them to broaden their horizons, and students like me get swayed by status games and jump into industries they don't care about so someone will reward them for being useful.

In all of these cases, we are brought down by our hunger (literal and metaphorical), our desire to prove ourselves, and the realistic impulse to be a part of and be recognized by the seductive structures of society. So it seems that many a man, living a life in so-called pursuit of high seas and those lauded ideals, is rarely able to see beyond his local bay, his glorious ship in reality just a small piece of flotsam, floating back and forth in the small corner of how him and his peers see their well delimited region of the world, him in it.

We try to go beyond our finite scale and identify with an effectively infinite universe, but is it really possible? Can we use our finite lives to cross through those waters and above tremendous waves to find new ground? 1

Maybe we are too limited by reality – we need resources to survive, we have to make ourselves legible and work with others, and we are surrounded by harsh feedback loops. On top of that, society instills this mindset by punishing or rewarding us based on our work and how good it is, starting in school. This process cements our desire for recognition, and harms our creativity by subduing it to an audience.

This is dangerous because our education couples the infinite game of art and creativity with the finite one of local validation and reward. It teaches us there is this nearby signal of quality which is reflective of art more generally, and of our worth. And so we start replacing the goal with its measure. We let the finite scope of our lives, the validation and constraints surrounding us implicitly replace the infinite target.

Maybe this tension is inevitable. But maybe not, and perhaps this tension arises precisely because we frame the infinite game as something for an individual to pursue rather than something for the world to inhabit – as an individual's foray rather than a tree of parallel paths. If finite games are about separation, the self winning against the other, maybe infinite games are not really games played by individuals but a singular expression of unity— erasing the boundary between you and the world you engage with. Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, urges for this shift from pursuit to raw presence:

This perspective renounces goal driven behavior, prioritizing awareness and a sense of unity with the world. All self centered thought limits our vast mind. The goal was never the point. Act strictly in the moment.

This is hard, and might seem grossly unintuitive or incomprehensible. I personally have internalized the frame of the goal, the objective, the meme of success and efficiency.

But when you hide away your sense of self to purely engage with the world, the actions you take feel more natural, boundaries dissolve, and your perception is enhanced. This is flow, like Arjuna focusing in the Mahabharata (quoting my last post):

Dronacharya gave a test to his students. He showed them the bird and said, what do you see? One by one they said the bird, the leaves, the trees, the people around, etc... And then he asked Arjuna: what do you see? And Arjuna looked onto the bird and the storm calmed and the leaf stopped its course and his breath shortened and for a moment he stood at the edge and the world shrunk until there was no longer such a thing as an edge and he saw what the bird was and he said: I see its eyes. And then his limbs moved of their own accord and he drew his arrow and shot it straight into its eyes.

For Arjuna the question of control and trajectory and choice and energy dissolve into the simple reality that the world is in front of you and the wind is pushing you straight forward and your legs are walking onwards and your eyes are staring down the path and all you see is the eyes of bird. And then there is no notion of control or you and your shape hitting against the world there is simply the motion of life slipping from one moment to the next in fundamentally the only trajectory that made sense.

It seems to me that the lifeblood of the infinite game is the person who is defined by this state of flow, and this deep love of the essence of the game. This class of individual is deeply motivated by the thing for what it is, and deeply free by nature of this fact. That freedom is what allows them to actually innovate, and ignite those campfires which other players will gather around, like new movements, new styles, or new ways of seeing the world.

In Critique of Judgement, Kant defines genius as "the mental predisposition through which nature gives the rule to art". The genius is then precisely this individual that is able to uncover the new rules of the game, by escaping the mold defined by the rest of society and the standards of what exists. The genius rejects those constraints to stare deeply at the world and find these new rules emerge from nature like diamonds shining in the dark! The genius has the depth of courage required to be happy looking at the world alone2, and the intensity to decompose and dive into nature to understand it, both its physical reality (in doing science), or one's authentic and shared experience of it (art). The genius' reward is to appreciate the new structure created or discovered, and see the world smoothly move onward.

This is how you play the real infinite game – jumping out into the wide open sea at full mast, in love with the world, momentarily forgetting that there is even a tomorrow to account for, and starting to see something worth looking at and understanding in the distance.

In that case, the path to infinity is simply now. What do you see? Look outside, it's beautiful.

I stare onto San Francisco and feel its striking energy. I have been drawn to this place ever since my family left when I was a child, off to France. This is the gathering place for those who have the courage to uproot their lives to do something big. Do things that scale. Reach billions. Change the world. When people drop out and go somewhere with a dream, they go to SF. Because they want to make the world a better place. Or at least that's what the twitter dudes say.

As I walk through the streets, past the drugged and the homeless, in the shadows of the biggest companies of the world, I feel the inane scale and contradiction of the American dream. San Francisco – with its ads for programmer tools and AI chatbots, its crazy prices, and the looming headquarters of every tech company you could think of–gives you the constant sense of being in the most powerful, disorganized place in the world. SF is where the titans of tech hand out software like Prometheus did fire.

Will I bear a torch, or will I lay down the flames? Will we too be punished eternally for what we bring to humanity?

To change the world, you must purge the culture that once was yours with cleansing fire, for the old order of things to pass away. You move to SF, you get a little room with just a mattress and a Mac, and to handle the demands on your time and attention you sacrifice certain things. Some of your relationships, some of your passions, maybe a few values, off they go into the fire. Cleansed away.

And by letting go of the culture you knew, you have earned the freedom and time to dream up a new world. And so in SF those who take this trade make up the city of international misfits, proposing an ideal radical nonconformity, with the rats and AI maximalists and cryptobros and biohackers and all the rest collectively grinding out new tech.

But as I peer through the door to see this place where I will probably live soon enough, I feel the hairs on my skin rise... What is the cost of this kind of freedom? Do I feel something burning? I can smell it in the eyes of the tech bros I met at the Lu.ma house party. Or in the uncertain tone of young people asking which AI ship they should jump onto because they hear it's "going to change the world". But I also sense a hint of that fire in my soul pulling me forwards to this place, for better or worse.

Fire can either build a civilization or burn it to the ground. And you don't really know which it is before you play with it for the first time. And this fire is pretty breathtaking – technology beyond what our ancestors could conceive, AI that can do things we never could, and imaginable wealth and drive reaching up across the sky and illuminating the world. They say this fire can solve your hardest problems. But I also feel it's burning the moths one by one.

But hey! Come to SF and be free. Come and be different. A culture where you reconsider what the world could be and propose to transform it is appealing.

A culture inevitably gets anchored and grounded in specific symbols, codes, and forms of success, even in SF. And then your idea of success morphs into that of those around you. It seems that people in SF are being pulled away from the dreams they had that and into this fire that has transformed the tech of the 21st century. But this shared notion of what is "important" or "cool" chips away at the vision of a specific wish they could bring alive, replaced by the idea of transforming the world itself.

When I encounter the epitome of this phenomenon in SF, the disgust makes me want to leave. But it would be a lie to say I don't relate to where it comes from. I don't want to be left behind. I want to do something and I am worried all these values I claim will leave me trailing in the dust. But also I know that that path is precisely how the specific, desired directions of impact one might have becomes crudely replaced by their magnitude. Entranced by this idea of being at the front and center of the world, our own name in the making, we fail to improve it, and might even cause its loss.

I am French and American, and I've lived with the same tired criticisms from each side my whole life:

"All they know how to do is work. They're missing the whole point of life, burning their days away chasing milestones they'll never truly savor, forever reaching for a tomorrow that never arrives."

versus

"They are irrelevant, moved to the sidelines of history, surviving on the pennies we pay to visit their quaint cities."

I feel sandwiched between these two cultures. On one hand, SF is surreal. SF is probably where the AI transition happens. But it is in Paris that I feel the spice, when I take the time to walk along the river and listen to hundreds of young people bask in the shadow of beautiful monuments. Or when I take the time to watch a movie that captures a single emotion I have never seen depicted so well, and I want to put it all to the page.

It is in that moment that I am reminded that magic does not always serve to augment itself. That you can just sit in those pockets of time and feel it rise. It is in this contrast that I see the difference between those who pursue magic and those whose pursuit is in fear of never becoming magicians. But it is also then that I feel the contrast between those who end up doing things and those who don't.

In contrast with the American technocrat, the French hero seeks out new experiences and tries to make sense of the world, potentially without having a big impact. Our elite is selected based on intelligence rather than drive and potential of changing the world. Our educational selection system is known for highly challenging exams taken two years after high-school. Admissions have strong social crediting effects, stronger than in the US. Our society seems to carry a strong historic respect for intellectual competence, but not really the kind of agency and entrepreneurial spirit that US admissions seem to reward.

To caricature France, this system creates a comfortable, intellectually rich elite that cherishes ideas and intrinsic joy, often without actively pursuing real-world impact. It breeds inertia—but also fosters deep, genuine reflection about what truly matters beyond KPIs or social validation. The wisdom learned from this process is a key part of impacting the world in a precise, controlled way.

The more you impact the world, the more making these two components work together is key. The more getting the "direction" of the impact right is important. Because this isn't just my own personal dilemma; it’s a reflection of the broader question we're all facing in navigating the profound implications of AI. If we forget either side—if we lose touch with introspection or abandon ambition altogether—we risk losing control over our collective future.

We are now in a period where people are trying to build intelligent systems that are as smart as potentially every human. This is the raging fire of our time. Artificial General Intelligence. You can feel it in the nervous energy at startup parties, the soaring AI valuations, and the determined faces streaming into research labs each morning, fuelled by the impression they are in the last era of human relevance.

The idea of AGI drastically increases the sense of urgency people are feeling - there could literally be a time limit on when/how you can impact the world. But also this means it is the right time to think about the mindset of the people who build that machine. And the people building it are growing increasingly captivated by fiery visions of an unstable future. We see the political tension rise between the US and China. We see predictions of a potential technology that will make or break the world in the next 5 years. And we see the whole city around us writhing to make sense of it all.

I have heard the AI researchers telling me to get into a lab quick because soon they will stop hiring because of how good their model is. Or the ones uttering visions of doom, feeling the urgency in their work as they are forced to try and play the role of Atlas. And the thing is, they could be right.

But beware of jumping into the fire for the sake of controlling it. Beware what happens to your brain and your dreams when you lean against it and feel the heat rise against your skin. Because you will start feeling afraid, and you will start getting burned. And if you are my motivated by the fire burning under your ass, then urgency will blind you from holding onto the things you truly cared about in the world, as they fade into tendrils of flame.

I think this is partially why a lot of the old AI doomsayers went and made the companies created to "ensure safe AI" that are now competing to build AGI. Because urgency makes you race at the expense of your epistemics. And maybe you choose to jump fully into the fire at the end, and as you burn, you gain power and some influence over what happens. But by then it might be too late, or you may no longer be able to hold onto those old values. But maybe you create something that people are in awe of. Maybe you get money and power and a spot at the forefront of history. But one day you realize you can't remember the things that brought you here in the first place, and you try to say something, or change course, and you can't. And then you scream, and your scream stops in your mouth against the bitter taste of ash.

I am writing this because I feel the fire lapping against my feet. I want to believe I can steer it without burning away who I am, but the truth is—I don't really know. Maybe this is more than I can bite off. Maybe there is a sensitivity I hold on to that will slowly decay. Maybe this talk of authenticity and process will distance me from ever touching the world.

But I think the first step is to confront the tension directly and admit it's terrifying. To openly acknowledge that we are desperately uncertain, that the stakes are high, and that we still don't know if the world we're creating will be one worth living in.

Because I know that the machine is being built, and we are throwing more and more coals into the fire. Yet, despite the accelerating chaos, I am confident we will preserve some of those things that keep us human. Nonetheless, things will undoubtedly grow crazier; the moths will burn, people will panic, and drastic decisions will be made. In that chaos, we will urgently need sane human voices willing to navigate the confusion carefully.

And so, despite this fear, I want to at least try and step forward. To stare into the fire, determined not to be consumed by it. To embrace these visions of new intelligence without sacrificing my humanity at its altar. To strengthen myself and work towards the future I want to see.

Not because I am afraid, but because I have a beautiful vision of a world where humans are thriving. And I have ideas on the cooperative structures and research that can help us get there. It is the time to move with care and speed because the change will be real, and maybe it will be soon. And yes, it will be scary, confusing and alien.

But it is precisely when everything is on the table that you should not give yourself up to the fire. It is then that you should look onto the world, and search for true, beautiful things, and make sure it is those the fire lights up rather than burns.

—

Thanks to my friends, notably Euan, Aidan, Warren, Cat, and GPT4.5 for writing feedback.