15 years - a retrospective

✳ I still fear that I'm leading my precious workers, my co-founders and our clients to ruin every now and then.. and possibly for a good reason. I did cause my employees and the general population a paralysing headache with my blabbermouth after all. Maybe - no, definitely - more than once.

✳ And if it weren't for my sister and my friends, Aphelion would've never seen the success it now holds. From the tiny, ATG-backed "underdog" to the dominant force of the industry that we are today.. it still feels like a dream; a weird amalgamation of nightmare and euphoric delusion, something I dreamed up during my darkest days to combat the chaos inside my head. But it's real, apparently. At least that's what my tax advisor wants to make me believe.

✳ I think the strangest part of leading a company this big is.. for me personally it's.. I could imagine more fulfilling things. Money is a precious good, I'm not naive enough to believe that it's just a nice little aside to the suffocating pressure that rests on our shoulders, but the thing I missed the most from my time working at altitude are the hours upon hours I could spend just burying my nose in the substance behind the public appearances, getting lost in what really pulled me towards this industry in the first place - research.

✳ Marianne's support, her willingness to take over my 'official' work as ceo this early in our short history has been the blessing it needed for me to stay focused on the right thing. I could already feel the push and pull of being the central figure, not just as the one under constant scrutiny, but as the one who had to guide, advise and teach the precious men and women who decided they would take the plunge and apply for a job at the "ideological lunatic company".

✳ which.. brings me to the first group of people I want to thank formally and humbly.

✳ In the first few years of Aphelion's existence we employed thirteen-hundred programmers alone, now, fifteen years later we employ a team of nine people that still code by hand. I want to thank every single one of the twelve-hundred and ninety-one that left aphelion over time, who either saw no reason in spending their precious time working on a product that would replace them one day and left on their own, the ones who stuck to our side until we couldn't keep them busy anymore, the ones that left their role as a coder behind and became researchers working with Steve and Jon on our research efforts instead.

✳ To them I want to offer my sincere apologies - not as your former boss, not as the ceo of Aphelion, but as a man who saw too many people leave because of our creation - to the ones that didn't make it through the digitalisation. I know it won't erase the harm galileo and my vision did to your life's efforts, and there's no way to sugarcoat the immense grief it caused, and really, nothing I can say or do will make it better.

I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry.

✳ Success shouldn't be built on the career deaths of people that worked with passion and dedication on something that should've helped them, not hurt them. I can't undo the pain my creation and I have caused you, all I can do is promise - swear - that we are working day and night, with the government, with partners, with educators and social services, to build a market where your efforts and the efforts of the generations yet to come, won't be wasted any longer. AI is young, excruciating mistakes were made, and I take the full responsibility for them. My decisions were a big part of why all of this happened. You deserved better than a world where your talents aren't cherished the way they should be.

✳ while our employees at aphelion always aimed for humanity's benefit, we ourselves have done irreparable harm in the process of learning and understanding what impact our galileo family would have on the planet. we may have thought we acted for the sake of everyone, but we spent too little time focusing on who we might hurt with our work.

✳ and yet I'd like to thank the people that fought against our business tooth and nail, I want to thank the people who sent us emails, letters, protested in front of our hq when we went too far. it's voices like theirs that make a difference; voices loud and outraged that will move mountains if they form a choir of empathy and care for the world they live in. Without their persistence and efforts, the indulgent expansion that had taken over the industry wouldn't have come to the much needed halt that finally, finally forced us to rethink our approaches to computing and infrastructure. It was a painful step for us, an expensive one, but also a necessary push into the right direction.

✳ in the same breath I want to thank our more silent supporters. from the inception of Aphelion our team and I have struggled to find our place in this industry. not for lack of talent - our researchers are wonderful, diligent scientists and analysts, but more on them later - but because a company with our approach to a technology unprecedented, and my loose tongue soon turned us into a chosen adversary of many, both inside and outside our chosen battlefield. I've often spoken about my rather petty frustrations with how our message is treated, how I often felt that our attempts would be fruitless if even an approach like ours would incite this much antagonism.

✳ I won't make the mistake of putting us above our former colleagues, business partners and 'rivals', I lack the strengths that they possessed, but I am pleased that thanks to the unwavering support of a quiet, patient minority our message and mission prevailed after all. Without the constant encouragement of both our families and loyal fans and clients alike, aphelion wouldn't.. well, I wouldn't be here writing this to you if you hadn't believed in us in the first place. We all love to talk about profit and benchmarks, but sometimes a spark of good can ignite a fire burning hot enough to transform the entire landscape around us.

✳ last but not least I would like to express my gratitude for the people closest to me - our researchers. at work I'm surrounded by the smartest heads and cleverest hands guiding aphelion through our struggles with ease, men and women that - very much like myself - entered the industry to make a change, not to chase money. Their presence, their hard work, their continuous efforts to be the best they can is what's really driving aphelion forward. I might be a part of this team, acting as the bleeding heart and lucid dreamer, but without people like Jonathan and Steve, aphelion would be nothing more than another frontier lab pushing out model after model.

✳ with their boundless curiosity and the stubbornness we share, they're shaping our siblings into the precious treasures they are, putting their all into creating not just artificial intelligence, but intelligence that comes alongside something that I think the industry lacked for the better part of two decades: empathy.

✳ machine that is empathetic, honest and able to meet the user where they stand, that can engage with tenderness and enthusiasm both, that's what our researchers, analysts, neurologists and philosophers want to provide, and after a lot of ups and down we are slowly approaching a place that makes us proud to have pulled through for those 15 years. with Miracle out and about, offering her services for humanitarian work, and Zenith 6 being deployed in the medical research that before AI had been deemed too costly to pursue.. I think we are on the right path now. Finally.

with love and gratitude,