My name is Linus.

My research investigates the future of knowledge representation and creative work aided by machine understanding of language. I prototype software interfaces that help us become clearer thinkers and more prolific dreamers.

I’m also interested in what comes after today’s language and writing systems, and what learning, creating, and collaborating may look like in the long future of humanity. The aim of my research is to build interfaces and knowledge tools that expand the domain of thoughts we can think and qualia we can feel.

I’ve been writing online since 2014 – this blog is home to a half million words I’ve written about software research, creative work, community, and the life I live in between.

Over the years, I’ve built well over 100 side projects, from programming languages and compilers to 3D renderers, interactive learning environments, UI libraries, and a suite of personal productivity tools I depend on every day.

Elsewhere on the web, I also write more technical posts on software and some short fiction and other literary vignettes. Outside work, I play the piano and guitar – you can find my music on Spotify and at linus.coffee/music. I also dabble in digital art. I grew up in Korea and Indiana, went to school in Berkeley, and currently live in New York City.

I’m currently researching and advising on AI interpretability, interfaces, and deployment at Thrive Capital. Previously, I was a Research Engineer at Notion, Researcher in Residence at Betaworks, and before that a software engineer at Replit, Hack Club, and Spensa.

Speaking

Thinking with Sand, Thinking about representations Dec '24

SPC Demo Night, A notebook for seeing with language models Jul '24

AI in Production, Seeing like a language model Apr '24

Cognitive Revolution, Interfacing with AI Apr '24

AI-First User Interfaces, Seeing like a model Feb '24

Chain of Thought, How an AI Researcher Uses ChatGPT and Notion AI Dec '23

Unsupervised Learning, A Full Deep Dive into Notion AI Nov '23

AI Engineer Summit, The Hidden Life of Embeddings Oct '23

Lightning AI Meetup, Building Generative Interfaces Apr '23

LLMs in Production, Generative Interfaces beyond Chat Apr '23

MIT Generative AI Summit, The Future of Creation Mar '23

The Gradient, At the Boundary of Machine and Mind Dec '22

Betaworks Render, Sentence Gradients Aug '22

Go Time, Go beyond work Dec '21

GopherCon, When Toy Languages Grow Up Dec '21

Metamuse, Self-made tools Nov '21

The Changelog, Building software for yourself Aug '21

GopherCon EU, When Toy Languages Grow Up May '21

Get in touch

I’m most active on Twitter and GitHub as @thesephist. The best way to contact me is either through Twitter, or my email at my first name @ thesephist.com.