I grew up in Sibenik, a small town on the Croatian coast, and learned most things the way everyone there does, outside. The classroom is where I fell in love, several times.
Computers came first, then mathematics, and a few years later philosophy, psychology and sociology, which I started reading on my own. For a long time they sat on separate shelves, and getting older has mostly meant watching them spill into each other, until the question that kept me reading the humanities, how anyone becomes who they are, turned into a question about the machines I build. I expect to spend my life on it.
My own answer is mostly the rooms I was let into. The University of Zagreb gave me three Rector’s Awards in one year and more patience than I deserved, and somewhere around my second year I stopped counting the hackathons I won; the better question is how many I have not. EPFL and a summer at CERN opened a few more, and now I am at Harvard on a full scholarship, studying data science and cross-registering at MIT.
Agents never get rooms like that. We train a model once, send it into the world with a prompt and no memory, and then act surprised that it never grows up. People get everything that comes after school, the institutions and the slow years of working out what they want, and I think agents need something like it. I call that the nurture layer and wrote a short manifesto about it. It is also why I work on mechanistic interpretability, safety and alignment, because anything that picks up good habits from the company it keeps can pick up bad ones, and I would rather watch that happen in a sandbox.
Most of my days go to Hydra, which started as a factory of small consumer apps built and run by agents and did better than any of us expected. Now we are turning it into a venture studio, so that people with good ideas and fewer chances than I had can build companies alongside agents and get backed early, which today happens to very few. I love this work, and I think it can move the world a little in a better direction.
I used to play basketball. These days I write trivia questions and make things in whatever medium is closest, graphic design, photo, video and audio.
If you want to build something with me or tell me where I am wrong, write to me.