I’m a co-founder of Extant, an AI research lab. Alongside that work, my personal research interests center on automated science, scientific creativity, and open-endedness.
I’m interested in systems that help us decide what to investigate, learn from an experiment, and find the next worthwhile question.
Building is how I learn
I started programming as a kid, making games. That curiosity eventually led me to start companies: I founded EverWrite in 2011, then co-founded Rock Content in 2013 and served as its CEO.
After leaving, I returned to making software for myself, rediscovering the pleasure of building something simply because I wanted it to exist. I wrote about that in Selfish Software.
I’ve also worked on tools for building software with AI, including Epic. Making tools remains one of my ways of exploring an idea: a working version often reveals questions I couldn’t see on paper.
Questions I keep returning to
- 01
How can an AI system recognize a hypothesis worth testing?
- 02
How can one experiment open up further questions worth exploring?
- 03
What kinds of tools help people think and create beyond what they could do alone?
This site brings together my projects and writing as I explore those questions.