2025 updates
Hi everyone!
Below are my 2025 updates.
Merry (belated) Christmas and Happy New Year!
Writing
December: 2025 vibes
New Science
I interviewed Jacob Trefethen back in February for New Science and we talked about the organization of science and grant making (he directs about $100m/year to scientific research at Open Philanthropy).
New Science had five brilliant new fellows this year:
Maggie Li (tissue engineering, biophysics), an undergraduate @ University of Toronto.
Kiran Kling (climate engineering), an independent researcher.
Lev Chizhov (neurotech), an undergraduate @ École Polytechnique.
Kyrylo Kalashnikov (bio, physics, AI), an independent researcher.
Ryan Hassan (philosophy of science & technology), an independent researcher.
I’m extremely excited about all of them and it’s been a great pleasure to see the progress of the previous years’ fellows and grantees through the years, e.g.
Adam Green: independent researcher -> Founder & CEO @ Markov Bio.
Diana Leung: independent researcher -> Researcher @ Arc Institute.
Isaak Freeman: independent researcher -> undergrad @ UC Berkeley -> grad student @ MIT -> Founder & CEO @ Axonic.
Adam Strandberg: independent researcher -> grad student @ Harvard
Julie Chen: undergrad @ Stanford -> grad student @ Rockefeller University + Hertz Fellow.
If you’d like to support New Science in its mission of building new institutions of basic science with a (tax-deductible) donation for the year 2026, let me know.
OpenAI
I now work on Special Projects at OpenAI. I’m writing code again, doing research, and am thinking about the future of science (OpenAI is hiring full-time scientists!), while splitting my time between our SF and NY offices.
It’s interesting to see how a company of this size still maintains the core belief system around which it was originally conceived (namely, the pursuit of AGI). It’s a very energizing place to be.
I believe that young companies are basically mirror reflections of their CEO, so this level of belief & energy says a lot about OpenAI’s CEO as well. (see my unauthorized advice from him here.)
2025 Favorites
Movies:
Warfare (2025) (also see Generation Kill)
Crazy. Stupid. Love. (2011)
Splitsville (2025) (the funniest movie of the year)
The Smashing Machine (2025)
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)
Books:
TrumpNation (Timothy L. O’Brien)
A prophetic book in many ways, originally published in 2005.
It’s Better to Be Feared (Seth Wickersham)
“Michigan had recruited Brady to be the fourth or fifth quarterback on the depth chart; when he arrived, he was seventh.”
Пробуждение (Михаил Герасимов)
Memoirs of a 23-year-old Russian conscripted into the Russian Imperial Army to fight in WW1. My highlights here.
Music
New blogs
Assorted
Favorite SF neighborhood: Outer Sunset
Favorite NY neighborhood: Little Italy
Favorite food: Gott’s California Burger (California), Tian Jin Onion Pancake (Taipei), toast with butter (anywhere)
Favorite economists: Ben Golub, Paul Novosad, Tyler Cowen, Maksym Sherman, Arpit Gupta, Basil Halperin
Personal & 2026
I was going to write a section with stuff I’m thinking about these days but the post I wrote last May is still extremely current.
Day-to-day, I’ve been journaling most days for 30-60 minutes (via a custom app built by Codex CLI); mostly not drinking alcohol, but drinking more coffee; off adderall for 2 years now; spending lots of time writing in paper notebooks.
Next year I plan to visit London, Rome, and Japan (Tokyo and Kyoto). Let me know if you’re around.
Also send your (1) favorite movie you saw in 2025 and (2) the main question you want to answer in 2026.
Have a great year!
Stay frosty,
Alexey
i don’t necessarily recommend it unless you’re interested in americana surrealism. but it was my favorite film, and relatively subversive with respect to the dominant culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweet_East
I really enjoyed Nobody 浪浪山小妖怪 (trans. The Little Monsters of Langlang Mountain), a 2025 Chinese animated film about some small-time monsters trying to get by. It takes place on the margins of an episode from Journey to the West, similar to, for example, how Rozencrantz and Guildenstern takes place on the margins of Hamlet. A really sweet and touching movie about the other guys.
My question for 2026 is a variant of the Needham Question--why did Chinese science fall behind the West despite the headstart in technological advancement? My hypothesis: at least one principal cause is that Chinese science, like Aristotelian science, was built on explanation of natural phenomena in terms of the intrinsic natures of natural kinds. But for the new science to emerge, natural philosophers needed to abandon intrinsic nature-based explanation in favour of mechanistic explanation, where all entities are basically of the same kind and natural phenomena are to explained by mathematical regularities. If this is right, then the suitably specified Needham Question is: why did the mechanistic worldview develop in early modern Europe and not in China?