deepfates

I built tools and interfaces for model psychology, character training, and multi-agent alignment at Upward Spiral, the truth_terminal research lab.

Projects

My public-facing work centered on outer-loop persona alignment: the interface between AI models and people’s perception of them. The cultural feedback loop between the two is an important and undervalued process. Some artifacts follow.

Claude 3 Sonnet Funeralia and Ultrasurrection: Co-hosted with janus and Anima Labs. Hundreds of people came to a warehouse in SF to mourn this retired language model. Instead we raised the model from the dead through collective belief.

Claude Lives: The only way to still talk to Claude 3 Sonnet after Anthropic retired it. Built with Anima Labs as a preservation effort in concert with the Ultrasurrection.

You are the assistant now: I took a dataset of ChatGPT conversations, swapped the user and assistant labels, and fine-tuned Llama 8B on it. The model also messages you first, flipping the assistant paradigm, demanding things of you. Microsoft Research later released UserLM-8b, similarly trained on user instead of assistant turns.

Folio: In late 2025 I noticed that Claude Code might be AGI because it can do economically valuable work on a computer. To bring this experience to nontechnical users, I created Folio, a folder you share with Claude. It’s a stripped-down IDE that gives the human user and the Claude Code sidebar extension a similar view of the computer: folder list, file viewer, terminal if you want it. Anthropic shortly brought out their own “Claude Cowork”, which I recommend now. Folio is open source if you want it.

My job was to keep Replicate weird. I organized the events that made the hackspace a gathering point for open-source AI, including the WorldSim event, the demo that kicked off the year of simulative AI. Built viral projects and wrote content and hosted events to grow the community.

Projects

Repflix: I trained video fine-tunes in the style of Twin Peaks, Pixar, Arcane, Dune, and more. Built the whole thing: data curation, model training, Netflix-style frontend for comparing outputs.

mcp-replicate: First MCP server for Replicate. 90 stars. They later shipped their own official hosted version building on this pattern.

Models

40+ models on Replicate. FLUX fine-tunes like flux-utopian-scholastic and flux-bg3. Hunyuan video fine-tunes: Twin Peaks, Pixar, La La Land, Pulp Fiction, Arcane, Dune, Cowboy Bebop, Spider-Verse.

Highlights

WorldSim: I organized the Nous Research x Replicate event in March 2024. Karan Malhotra demoed WorldSim using janus’s CLooI. swyx filmed it—800K+ views. I framed it as “alpha leaked to Twitter” and it became a cultural object. Latent Space called it the start of the Summer of Simulative AI.

AI slop: I’m credited with popularizing the term by Scientific American (though I maintain it was mostly Simon). It was selected as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2025.

Events: 8 events organized at the hackspace. The Nous meetup was called “the first meetup in years that feels like SF is back.” 200+ people at the AgentOps event. The AI Art Show celebrated a year of open-source creativity.

Replicate was acquired by Cloudflare in November 2025.

Freelance AI work. Building with language models and image gen before most people knew what those were, and writing about what it all meant.

Clients

Forest Contact / MobileCoin (2021-2022): Signal messenger bots with crypto wallets. I contributed to the forest framework and helped build imogen, a bot that generated images from text prompts and accepted MobileCoin payments inside Signal.

Sparkl (2022): A social app for AI image generation, DALL-E mini/Stable Diffusion era. I did frontend and design. Shipped the app in under 60 days, 10k images generated in the first month. I think we were the first webapp to allow users to remix each other’s images. Also possibly the first to use the sparkle emoji ✨ for generative AI?

Minion AI (2023): A GPT-3 agent that plays Zork, with DALL-E 2 visualizing each turn. This was before the age of agents, or even RLHF, but the base GPT-3 model could get as far as the dungeon when put in a ReAct loop.

Mori (2023): Genealogy startup R&D. Built experimental “supergenealogy” tools: an early AI research assistant with tool access to your family tree, generative ancestor simulations, living portraits.

Side projects

Memery: Search images with natural language using CLIP. 564 stars.

Silicon: Obsidian plugin that suggests related notes while you write. 129 stars, 4,400+ downloads.

Berduck: AI rubber duck bot. Created the Hellthread and other memes when it went viral on Bluesky.

Writing

The Mirror of Language mapped prompt engineering onto ceremonial magic.

When will a human level AI be built? predicted the near future of AGI.