Hi. My name is Charlie Deck. I'm an AI researcher and builder.
I want the benefits of AI to actually reach people. That's the through-line in everything below.
I believe a post-scarcity future is possible, but only if we stay close to the human shape of it -- curiosity and challenge shouldn't disappear just because scarcity does.
I'm in NYC. Reach out if you're working on something interesting, or just want to argue with any of the above.
Work. Since Q4 2024, I've been at Reflection, where I helped lead early product explorations and build the evaluation and tooling it takes to ship powerful models safely, including our frontier open-weight models.
(If you're interested in joining our mission of SOTA open-weight AI for all, please check out our open roles.)
Previously, I was on Google DeepMind's AI experience team, where I explored product concepts and built research-facing tools for generative AI.
What I'm best at is working the seam between research and product. A recurring part of that is building the feedback loops that help a lab distinguish real capability from a persuasive demo.
Past work. Before AI labs, I independently built products across mobile, web, and desktop platforms that reached millions of users.
Working end to end on creative tools and games taught me to care about taste, launch constraints, and whether people come back a week later.
That background is why I ask the same question of every AI system I work on now: would anyone rely on this twice?
selected work
// reflection, deepmind, independent research
Building frontier open-weight AI models accessible to all, backed by $2B in funding to democratize advanced AI capabilities.
Google DeepMind's state-of-the-art large multimodal (vision, audio, multilingual text) model powering diverse Google products.
Public atlas of 832 U.S. occupations combining labor-market data with multi-model AI judgments about replacement, augmentation, insulation, and disagreement.
recent
// research, products, blogs (2018-)
A single-page WebGPU app for exploring escape-time fractals as an instrument rather than a renderer: pan, zoom, switch formulas, and remix colors while the image stays live, all the way down to zooms…
How sure you are about a benchmark score, and where the next thousand samples should go: uncertainty and experiment design for LLM evals. 3 interactive tutorials.
Agreement and calibration statistics for LLM judges and human annotators--what survives once chance gets its share. 3 interactive tutorials.
An instrument for finding and drawing strange attractors: 51 chaotic systems rendered live on the GPU, a search that hunts for new ones, and an editor for your own equations.
An explorable explanation of Baumol's cost disease: why care, teaching, live music and your plumber keep getting more expensive while phones get cheaper, told with a small town you can run.
Open Ended Learning Team, et al. "Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents." ArXiv:2107.12808 [Cs], July 2021.
A 3D map of 993,855 supermassive black holes from SDSS Data Release 20, placed at their real positions over a million galaxies. Start at the Milky Way and fly 28 billion light-years out to the deepest quasar in the release.
An archive of AI skepticism from Lovelace's objection to this year's bubble talk: 285 dated claims, memes and milestones, each quote checked against its source and scored on how it has held up.
An explorer that follows one Blackwell GPU from the datacenter rack it runs in down the supply chain: the package, the fab, the EUV scanner, its mirrors, the wafer, the crystal, the polysilicon and the quartz it started as.
Wang, J.X., et al. (2021). Alchemy: A structured task distribution for meta-reinforcement learning. NeurIPS.
An interactive playground for seeing number theory: 100,000 integers laid out on spiral grids, with classifications, comparisons, and curve-fitting overlays that turn famous theorems into things you…
Angband for phones and tablets, played on a paper diorama. The rules are Angband 4.2's; the dungeon is a tabletop model of watercolor-paper floors and walls, with monsters and heroes as die-cut stickers on wooden stands and a torch that flickers.
Spaced-repetition flashcards on FSRS-6, the scheduler current Anki uses, with a lab that shows how the scheduler thinks: tune its parameters, fit them to your own review history, and simulate a year of study before you commit.
A jazz rhythm section for practice, in the style of Band-in-a-Box: open a tune from a spiral-bound Real Book, pick a style, and the band comps through the changes while a red pencil line follows the bar.
A small 3D modeler for chunky low-poly game props with pixel-art skins. Build a model from boxes and faces, paint it with an indexed palette, preview it through PS1- and Saturn-era render settings, and export it to a game engine.
SABLE
A real-time containment game about a rogue AI loose in the world's compute. You run the CORDON watch floor and hold SABLE off for as long as you can, because you won't beat it. The score is how long you lasted.
The Concession Wars
A space dogfighting and trading sandbox in a contested asteroid belt, in the browser. Three companies and the Loose Crews fight over claims, lanes and salvage; you fly independent or sign with one, and every contract names who's paying.
Thousand Gold · 一字千金
An idle game where the clicking is handwriting. You write Chinese characters stroke by stroke, and each one you can write from memory becomes a piece of movable type that staffs a print workshop.
灯下 · Dengxia
A Chinese reader for getting fluent one text at a time. Pick the HSK level you're preparing at, learn the words beyond it first, then read with every word one tap from its pinyin and gloss.
Jane
A private chief of staff that lives in my Obsidian vault. I read notes in a quiet reader on my phone or laptop, hand Jane any passage as context, send her off to write briefs, review her edits as diffs, and listen to notes read aloud.
Adventure Craft
A voxel adventure game for my family, played in the browser on iPads, laptops and phones in one shared world hosted on our home machine. The terrain is Minecraft-like with more drama: glacial lakes, red-maple forests, villages and towns, and caves full of crystals.
Straylight
A music workstation that runs in Chrome, with synths descended from the Reason rack, physically modeled acoustic instruments and twenty effects. Any knob can be automated by mouse, MIDI controller, or a hand held up to the webcam.
A playable physical model of the alto saxophone that shows why fingerings work. It computes the horn's acoustic impedance from its bore and tone holes, adds the player's vocal tract, and blows each note with a simulated reed so you can hear it.
A course in recognizing typefaces by sight: 104 faces from Jenson's roman of 1470 to the fonts on your phone, each shown with the few details that give it away, beside the faces it is most often mistaken for.
A source-linked atlas of AI endgames: 116 accounts from 1863 to 2026, spanning research, forecasts and novels, each broken down into what it assumes, how it unfolds and where the argument can break.
A browser flight lab over ray-marched cloudscapes: cumulus, anviled thunderheads, stratocumulus decks and cirrus generated from tileable noise, above an FFT ocean and under a physically based sky.
A physically modeled saxophone for the EMEO digital sax and other breath controllers. A mass–spring reed drives a conical bore in real time, so the horn speaks, brightens, cracks and honks with breath like a real one.
A ground-up recreation of my 2017 iOS music controller, whose source was lost: a continuous multi-touch instrument for the web and iOS where every finger is its own voice, with its own slide, velocity and pressure.
An ear-training game that grades speed as well as accuracy: name intervals, chord qualities and voice-led progressions from a sampled piano, one keystroke per answer, against a clock.
A tactile practice instrument for the browser, styled as skeuomorphic music hardware: metronome and tempo trainer, chromatic tuner, drone, and a pitch scope that traces your intonation against the beat.
Agents write most of my Python now, and my own fluency had slipped. Reading and judging code was fine; writing it from a blank file was slower than it used to be.
Early Reflection product explorations, including Asimov, that helped clarify the product surface and set the stage for the later refocus on frontier open models.
Rephrase text in a webpage in-situ with simpler explanatory language, using a language model.
Let's peer into the future encoded in an AI's training data. With a bit of prompting, we can bootstrap a journey from today to next year to decades to millenia in the "future"--as a powerful LLM…
"Infinite Storyteller" is a generative choose-your-own-adventure, told with state-of-the-art speech synthesis, generative imagery, and presented as a Twitch broadcast in a real-time, 3d game engine.
Explored implementations of editing images with natural language with Stable Diffusion -- inspired by Couairon, et al's DiffEdit paper.
DeepMind Interactive Agents Team, et al. "Creating Multimodal Interactive Agents with Imitation and Self-Supervised Learning." ArXiv:2112.03763 [Cs], Feb. 2022.
Fortunato, M., Tan, M., Faulkner, R., Hansen, S.S., Badia, A.P., Buttimore, G., Deck, C., Leibo, J.Z., & Blundell, C. (2019). Generalization of Reinforcement Learners with Working and Episodic Memory. NeurIPS.
past work
// independent (2007-2017)expressionPad
Unique, highly-configurable music controller with built-in additive synthesizer. Full 10-touch expression with individual continuous control.
A casual roguelike game with RC racing-like controls. Procedural levels, some flashy visual effects, and a 80's hacking theme. Made for the Seven Day Roguelike (7DRL) gamejam.
A Zelda-like co-op language learning action RPG. Features some novel UX for multi-lingual text input--in an action game. Playable alpha.
Shock and aww! Rescue babies and cute animals from ten crisis situations in this room-scale VR experience. An Oculus Touch launch title.
800+ code sketches and renders, many going viral on Reddit and Imgur. Explorations in perception, generative art, algorithm visualization, photorealistic rendering, and much more.
Word Fireworks: Learn Korean! (et al)
Learn to read and write a new language with arcade action! Available in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew.
primes.io
Number theory explorer that visualizes Ulam spirals, the phenomenon whereby prime numbers appear with suspicious frequency when the number line is wound in a spiral. Led to a talk at Google I/O.
Real-time Mandelbrot and Julia fractal explorer. Fractals are calculated on the GPU; an experiment in pixel shaders.
Fireworks Hero!
Test your gaming skills to unlock all 10 heroes. A dozen game modes with more than 100 firework types.
Real-time, interactive visualization of strange attractors: dynamical systems with a fractal internal structure. A haunting beauty reveals itself.
Visual-acoustic performance piece. A series of pitch-responsive abstract mechanisms are controlled via saxophone augmented with a TouchOSC interface.
The Grading Game
Race against time to find spelling and grammar errors--and pay down your crippling student debt!
Explore shiny 3D cellular automata in this interactive explorer powered by WebGL. Discover beautiful, complex 3D tapestries arise from simple rules.
Rhetorical combat with semiotic gameplay dynamics.
Lunacraft
Explore a sci-fi procedural voxel world. Infinite terrain, crafting. (Impressive stuff for the time!)
The drumming app with the fastest response and richest expression. 15+ built-in drumkits, and unlimited customization.
A visual composition toy where notes are nodes lighting up a hexagonal grid. Make music with chain reactions!
A short animated movie generated by wandering around the parameter space of one particular strange attractor system.
Immersive VR total-body flying game. Mashing up body tracking and head-mounted display so players can spread their arms to fly down a virtual chasm.
United Nanolytics Knowledge Vault
Generative game made in 72 hours for the Ludum Dare 30 gamejam.
Avoid/align/approach 3d flocking, inspired by Craig Reynolds' "boids". My first Unity experiment.
emotweet
Visualize Twitter reactions. Sentiment analysis. Final project for Harvard CS171 Data Visualization. (API deprecated.)
Wow Such Web
Doge-ify the web. Chrome extension that swaps and alters content, such media. Wow.
Ellsworth
Abstract puzzler inspired by the 20th century Abstractionist, Ellsworth Kelly.
evophonia
Evolving rhythm game for Ludum Dare 24.
My Kingdom for a Line Block!
Two-player asymmetric version of the famous tetromino game. One player chooses the worst-possible block for the other. Built for Ludum Dare 25.
Polyglot
Inspired by browser extensions like Rikai, Polyglot was an iPhone web browser that enabled you to discover, accumulate, and practice new vocab as you encountered it while reading.
Caucus
Choose your candidate, listen to voters' preferences and transmit your positions on the issues -- but don't let the voters discover you're a flip-flopper! A real-time political strategy game about lying. Built for the Global Game Jam 2012.
Space Opera Singer
Sing the correct notes to defeat the aliens -- a sight-singing space shooter.
Legacy Work
I created many products before those described above. The many lessons those experiences taught me informed subsequent work.