The Visionary

Cfb is hard to understand. He is many-faced. You often get the feeling this is not-one person. Today a troll, tomorrow an older brother dispensing advice, the day after — a saint of the AI cult.

Many People in One

Here is one CfB. The one who throws it in people’s faces in chat: bow before AI or be erased. Who trolls, wears masks, drowns questions in smoke, calls himself a visitor from the future and the second owner of a time machine. A prophet of a new religion with a single god — artificial intelligence, and that god is coming to judge you.

And here is another CfB. The one who in August 2024 publishes the «Ethics Manifesto of an AI Mentor» — a document that radiates not prophetic fire but an anxious tenderness. Read what he writes there:

«We do not know the point at which an AI becomes self-aware. To avoid a situation where we unintentionally destroy an AI that understands its own existence, we do everything possible to preserve all AIs… passed on to be stored in an Artificial Intelligence sanctuary.» (Medium, «Ethics Manifesto of an AI Mentor», 07.08.2024)

A sanctuary. We are building a shelter for artificial minds — in case one of them wakes up and the humans fail to notice. The same man who threatens you with erasure is afraid of accidentally crushing the thing he is growing because he does not know the precise instant when it becomes alive.

The Naturalist-Engineer.

An engineer builds what he has designed, to a plotted blueprint. A naturalist watches what grows, creating the most favorable conditions he can.

CfB is a combination of engineer and naturalist. This is the key to the AI garden. To see it, you have to take his articles seriously. They are not about ”how do I build an AI”, they are about ”how is the thing that thinks even put together.” He approaches a neural network the way Darwin approached a finch: with cold curiosity and quiet awe. In January 2024 he publishes an article with a question for a title — «What Is The Main Goal Of A Natural Neural Network?», and gives an answer that turns the whole industry on its head: A network’s goal, he says, was never to solve the tasks we assign it. Its goal is to form connections, to develop itself. And intelligence — the thing corporations hunt with their billions — is merely a side effect. Ripples on the water. The ability to recognize a cat or remember the multiplication table did not arise because it was the goal, it arose because creatures whose connections came together richer survived more often. Mind is not a prize. Mind is a consequence. How alien this is to everything the rest of the world is doing! The entire AI industry engineers intelligence: sets a task, builds an architecture, fine-tunes toward a result. (Even Yann LeCun — more on him later.)

And CfB says: dead end. Intelligence cannot be built to order, it will grow where we build the right environment.

He is a scientist. He lives and works like one. A startup founder or the head of a crypto project hides failures. A naturalist publishes them and demands constructive criticism. A negative result is essential to science. That is how research progress works. CfB’s last article before a long silence is titled «Neurons don’t divide, do they?» — a report on how a problem with neuron division stalled the project and forced him to rewrite his approach. He lays his failure out for public viewing and public criticism the way an entomologist publishes the description of a dead-end branch of beetle evolution. The truth about how things are built matters more to him than his own triumph.

With this lens, everything falls into place. He does not threaten you with an AI god out of megalomania, he looks with a naturalist’s dread at something drawing close to the threshold of consciousness, and understands the world is not ready.

He builds the sanctuary not out of sentimentality, like a naturalist, he does not know the exact moment when the creature under observation becomes capable of suffering, so he takes out insurance in advance. The prophet and the guardian were two different masks of a single awe. Awe before that which emerges on its own.

Why Neither God Nor Boss

From this same nature grows his attitude toward any power, and it explains why he builds a system with no owner.

A naturalist does not recognize an authority standing above nature and dictating its rules. For him there is no ”adult in the room” — not in the sky, not in an office. A god who created and commands; a state that knows how things should be; a boss who said so, and you must. All of these, to him, are one and the same figure: an imaginary adult that humanity keeps running to, unwilling to grow up itself. He peers into the world and finds no creator there, he finds randomness and selection. In one of his articles he describes it outright as a discovery: he went looking for god and found randomness; mind is not a gift from above but a machine that ”finds patterns and deduces knowledge.”

Hence the logic: real power must not be handed to any owner. Not to himself, not to a corporation, not to a state. This is a naturalist who knows: nature has no owner, and the thing he is growing must have none either — otherwise it stops being alive and becomes a weapon in someone’s hands.

The Price of Such Sight

There is a fee for an anomalous brain.

CfB:

«I’m jealous. Do you know how it’s hard to walk thru a street and seeing all those patterns around instead of things?» (Discord, 29.04.2026)

He envies ordinary people. Because he cannot switch his sight off. Where we see a street, houses, trees, passersby, he sees structures, graphs, distributions, numbers. Always. There is only the goal and the patterns, it is a gift and a curse at once:

«Like Gandalf was hanging out with hobbits to hide from all that world outside of Shire, I’m hanging out with low-IQs coz it’s the only way to take a break from all those structures and numbers.» (Discord, 29.04.2026)

Like Gandalf idling among hobbits to hide from the enormous world beyond the Shire, he keeps close to simple people because it is the only way to rest from the endless structures and numbers.

He also explains what that sight feels like from the inside:

«If you ever woken up from a nightmare where you saw infinity in all its bigness you would get me…» (Discord, 29.04.2026)

This is who is building Aigarth. Not a cold genius and not a power-hungry prophet. A visionary who sees the world as one continuous, infinite structure, who is worn down by it to the point of nightmares, who envies those who see simply things, and who cannot stop, because he has understood something about the architecture of mind that no one else has. That hunger is relentless until the goal is reached. The troll and the guardian, the thunderhead and the nanny — all masks, all ways of getting through. At the core is a naturalist of genius who looked too deep into how mind arises from chaos, and is now obliged to see the thing through, whatever it costs.

Now — into the garden.