Hi. My name is Charlie Deck. I'm an AI researcher and builder.
I work at the intersection of AI research, product, and engineering, helping teams get clearer on where frontier capability is real and what is worth building.
My background spans creative software, games, and experiments, and it still shapes how I think about interfaces, leverage, and whether a system actually changes what people can do.
I'm in NYC. Reach out if you want to chat.
Work. Since Q4 2024, I've been at Reflection, where I helped lead early product explorations, build evaluation and tooling systems, and support work on making frontier AI reliable in practice, including frontier open-weight models accessible to all.
Previously, I was on Google DeepMind's AI experience team, where I built prototypes and research-facing tools for generative AI. My superpower is bringing research, product, and execution together around systems that need to work in practice. A recurring part of that work is building the feedback loops that help distinguish an impressive demo from a dependable system.
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, games, and experiments taught me to care about taste, interfaces, and the gap between an impressive demo and something people actually return to.
That background still shapes how I approach frontier systems now: not just whether they can do something once, but whether they are coherent, usable, and worth relying on.
recent
// blogs, ai, deepmind (2018-)
Reflection AI Open Models
Building frontier open-weight AI models accessible to all, backed by $2B in funding to democratize advanced AI capabilities.
Job Exposure to AI, by AI
Public atlas of 832 U.S. occupations combining labor-market data with multi-model AI judgments about replacement, augmentation, insulation, and disagreement.
Product Explorations
Early Reflection product explorations, including Asimov, that helped clarify the product surface and set the stage for the later refocus on frontier open models.
Gemini
Google DeepMind's state-of-the-art large multimodal (vision, audio, multilingual text) model powering diverse Google products.
Explain with AI
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 train
"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.
Semantic image editing
Explored implementations of editing images with natural language with Stable Diffusion -- inspired by Couairon, et al's DiffEdit paper.
Xland
Open Ended Learning Team, et al. "Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents." ArXiv:2107.12808 [Cs], July 2021.
Playhouse Environment
DeepMind Interactive Agents Team, et al. "Creating Multimodal Interactive Agents with Imitation and Self-Supervised Learning." ArXiv:2112.03763 [Cs], Feb. 2022.
Alchemy Task Suite
Wang, J.X., et al. (2021). Alchemy: A structured task distribution for meta-reinforcement learning. NeurIPS.
DeepMind Memory Task Suite
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
// solo (2007-2017)expressionPad
Unique, highly-configurable music controller with built-in additive synthesizer. Full 10-touch expression with individual continuous control.
roguetronic
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.
Slashcards: Learn Japanese
A Zelda-like co-op language learning action RPG. Features some novel UX for multi-lingual text input--in an action game. Playable alpha.
Rescuties! VR
Shock and aww! Rescue babies and cute animals from ten crisis situations in this room-scale VR experience. An Oculus Touch launch title.
bigblueboo gifs
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.
fractals.cc
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.
attractors.io
Real-time, interactive visualization of strange attractors: dynamical systems with a fractal internal structure. A haunting beauty reveals itself.
dyson modes
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!
cubes.io
Explore shiny 3D cellular automata in this interactive explorer powered by WebGL. Discover beautiful, complex 3D tapestries arise from simple rules.
Argument Champion
Rhetorical combat with semiotic gameplay dynamics.
Lunacraft
Explore a sci-fi procedural voxel world. Infinite terrain, crafting. (Impressive stuff for the time!)
Ratatap Drums
The drumming app with the fastest response and richest expression. 15+ built-in drumkits, and unlimited customization.
noteplex
A visual composition toy where notes are nodes lighting up a hexagonal grid. Make music with chain reactions!
Parameter Ghosts
A short animated movie generated by wandering around the parameter space of one particular strange attractor system.
NESTFALL
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.
space boids
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.