WHO AM I
Alexandru-Valentin Mușat
I build AI systems that see the world. Then I ruin it by asking what seeing actually means.
I read a lot, connect ideas across fields, and treat most explanations with the kind of polite skepticism that tends to annoy people who are very sure of themselves.
Endlessly inquisitive.
Probably wrong about half of it. Building minds that see anyway.
One concept. Multiple perspectives. No final answers.
Lenses
At some point I noticed that the same ideas keep surfacing across completely unrelated fields — physicists, psychologists, biologists, machine learning engineers, all rediscovering each other’s concepts and giving them new names, apparently without talking to each other. I found that both fascinating and slightly ridiculous. “Lenses” is my attempt to sit at that intersection. It’s a series of essays exploring how we see, think, and misunderstand the world — one concept at a time, through as many angles as seem honest. Each piece is versioned, a snapshot of my understanding when I write it, expected to change, be contradicted, or quietly embarrass me later. The perspectives here are a small, deliberately limited sample from the many that could exist; I’ve simply chosen not to write all of them, because infinite scroll already seems well covered as a business model.
- Anchoring
I am, by temperament, allergic to first numbers. When someone tells me an apartment is worth €200,000, my immediate reaction is to assume it is worth €150,000, because anyone offering me a number on first contact has a reason for offering that specific number, and the reason is rarely my benefit. I do not take prices at face value. I do not take expert opinions at face value. I do not even take meta-analyses at face value, which is why I read three of them before… Read more: Anchoring - Noise
I work in artificial intelligence. I should be excited about the moment we’re in. According to the industry I belong to, we are weeks away from artificial general intelligence, months away from the obsolescence of all knowledge work, and years away from a post-scarcity utopia administered by benevolent algorithms. I receive these forecasts in my inbox several times a day, sometimes from people I respect and sometimes from people who have never deployed a model to production but have very strong opinions about what models will… Read more: Noise - Projection
In the tenth grade, I bought a ring for a girl I liked. Not a metaphorical ring. An actual ring, from an actual store, with actual money I’d saved from doing nothing particularly useful — which, at sixteen, is the only kind of money available. The plan was not entirely my own: a female friend helped me pick it out, because I assumed — with the confidence of someone who has never tested his assumptions — that a girl would know what another girl wants. Two… Read more: Projection - Fragility
In my family, health was measured in cheek color. If you were red and round in the face, you were healthy. If you were thin, something was wrong with you and you probably needed a second lunch. This was not a fringe position. It was the consensus medical framework of an entire generation of Romanian families who had survived communism, a period during which food scarcity was real enough that the ability to put three courses on the table at lunch became a form of existential… Read more: Fragility - Entropy
At my workplace, there’s a gate in the courtyard. It has a lock. It has a key. For a brief, shining period in institutional history, it worked exactly as gates are supposed to work: it stayed locked, and people with keys used them. I understand this era has ended elsewhere as well. Then someone left it unlocked. It was more convenient that way — one fewer step between the parking lot and the door, and in the landscape of modern office life, one fewer step is… Read more: Entropy - Overfitting
I have a disc protrusion — right foraminal, L5-S1, in case you need the coordinates, and you don’t, but I’m going to give them to you anyway because that’s the kind of person I am — and a shoulder that has been sending me passive-aggressive signals for months. I haven’t had the shoulder investigated yet, because I’ve been too busy investigating orthopedic surgeons. The shoulder is patient. I am not. We make an excellent dysfunctional team. I built what I can only describe as a competitive… Read more: Overfitting
