It works! Welcome to Isaac's website.

The current time is: 2026-08-25 01:41:52 UTC. 2026-08-24 18:41:52 in San Francisco, (where I live).

You are visiting from: 216.73.217.178.

I'm Isaac. I like working with kind, thoughtful people to build large scale distributed systems. I also love skiing, and riding public transit. I also enjoy hi-fidelity audio despite being somewhat tonedeaf. I'm particularly interested in tools that make software engineering delightful (and the higher order effects of those tools), climate change, and building denser, more equitable cities with fantastic public transportation. (Before 2026)

I now believe that artificial general intelligence is the most interesting and important field and research area of our lifetimes (so far!). GPT-1 was released in 2018. In less than a decade, we have gone from crude systems capable of producing relatively clean-looking but gibberish language, to systems capable of writing (bad) poetry and rudimentary computer programs (with GPT-3), to systems capable of solving PhD-level mathematics problems, writing sophisticated computer programs (better than nearly all humans can) and working on very long-horizon tasks.

After seriously appraising their capabilities and spending significant time using them day to day, I have concluded that systems that exist today outperform most humans on a wide variety of tasks. I began to believe this in the aftermath of the release of GPT "reasoning" models in mid-2025. Progress since mid-2025 has accelerated, not slowed, and every talented software engineer I know has functionally automated the vast majority of the work that previously comprised their time.

Large AI research institutes remain unable to deploy new compute fast enough to support the scale of the training runs they would like to perform or to meet inference demand. In my (fairly uninformed) view, there is no reason to expect that progress will abate in the near future, and barring some unforeseen bottleneck, AI systems using the standard transformer architecture will continue to grow more advanced.


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