A piece I posted to my Instagram story in April 2026.

I’m a deep learning researcher, but sometimes I can’t tell whether I’m someone who actually does research or just someone trailing behind, belatedly chasing the output of a vast system. These days the difference doesn’t seem to come from questions or insights alone. A small number of organizations with enormous compute, data, and the means to deploy it set the direction, and everyone else gets pushed into the position of consuming or applying what they make. In moments like that, even I—a deep learning researcher—start to feel as though the scope of what I’m able to do has already been decided for me.

What’s even more unsettling is that people are increasingly coming to accept this concentration as a natural order of things. Anxiety circulates almost like the air we breathe, and the fear of being left behind gets turned into a product all too easily. Some people amplify that fear to gain influence and money. Watching it play out, I sometimes think that what I’m afraid of isn’t just my own personal failure to keep up, but the very process by which power tips to one side.

The reason I keep running workshops that are nearly free is that, to me at least, it feels like a small act of resistance. Even if I can’t change the larger current, I want to lower the threshold to learning and conversation. When everyone is drifting toward treating monopoly and impatience as a given, I at least don’t want to be the person who says it’s a given.

The irony is that even as I write this, I’m getting work done with Claude Code. Maybe that’s exactly what makes this piece more meaningful……