Here I am – standing in the same place as yesterday. I see how everything has changed right under my feet.

These are some of the richest moments of my life. I have the time and the energy to focus on the things that I care about. One month after leaving Google, I am working harder than ever. I'd like to talk about what I have been up to, what I'm planning to do, and what I see coming in the future.

This document originally had three sections: "What I Have Done", "What I Plan to Do", "What I See Coming". I have decided to separate "What I See Coming" into an independent document, given its scope and distinct target audience.

Some of a man's greatest fulfillment comes from exercising his ability to do aesthetic work. Aesthetic work, for me, is work I perform in pursuit of an aesthetic end. I get to choose what I find to be aesthetic and beautiful. Without a beautiful goal, I cannot be satisfied.

I left Google to find some more satisfying work. I stayed so long at Google because it was safe. I took a voluntary layoff because it represented middle ground, with the severance package giving me a period of safety and freedom. Safety is more important than freedom. There is such a thing as over-prioritizing safety.

What I Have Done

During the past four weeks I have been taking the maximal advantage of my freedom. In this time I have:

• Completed the first draft of my 2025 poetry collection
• Had my first two paying subscribers to lifestyle.photo
• Hosted a "deface my poetry" showing, where attendees sharpied up my writing
• Read 6 books
• Written a lot of poetry, multiple short stories
• Celebrated my girlfriend's and my 7 year anniversary
• Written goodbye letters to many of my Bay Area friends
• Learned how Nginx works (finally)
• Built a website for my sister's art portfolio
• Run a few LLMs locally
• Powered through David Silver's RL Course
• Created a small game and trained an RL model to play it
• Ran the longest I've run in my life (4.5 miles)
• Visited LA, visited Las Vegas
• Worked through a few of the Ilya 30u30 papers (low comprehension)
• Lots of miscellaneous tasks because no more insurance

I'm proud of the things that I've done so far. I think that, if i were to make this much progress each month over the next year, I would be satisfied.

What I Plan to Do

Before, I listed my four focus pillars during my unemployment:

• LLMs + RL
• Writing
• Prediction Markets
• Governance

I have only touched the first two during this first month. There is a lot to do! Some concrete for the end of the year:

• Produce an artifact similar to poetry.thornewolf.com (my 2024 collection) for my 2025 poetry collection
• RL train an LLM on a novel task (tentatively ASCII art generation)
• Visit >4 more cities (New York and London coming up)
• Create my first prediction market arbitrage setup
• Post my ~first blog post on the role of government in an AI world

Some concrete (but tentative) goals for the end of next year:

• Have any of my writing published in a magazine
• Attend an ML research conference (maybe earlier w/ NeurIPS 2025)
• Self-"publish" on ArXiv
• Meet the hiring bar for ML researcher at {OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind}
• Spend >=1 month out of the USA
• 1 big software project (Bayesian library?)
• 1 big AI project (RL Env)
• 1 big art project (multimedia?)

I landed in NYC on Wednesday, Sept. 17th. I'll be here for a little while.

What I See Coming

I am still working on my longer "What I See Coming" writeup. Since this document is my one month unemployment piece, I need to get it out before the five week point. Keep an eye out for "What I See Coming", where I speculate about the near future.