2025 Letter

Jan 02, 2026

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 friend s 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.