Who am I

Alexandru-Valentin
Mușat

Portrait of Alexandru-Valentin Mușat

Head of AI, computer visionBrașov | România

I build AI systems that see the world.Then I ruin it by asking what seeing actually means.

I read a lot, connect ideas across fields, and treat most explanations with the kind of polite skepticism that tends to annoy people who are very sure of themselves.

Labels are just explanations someone was very sure of.

object .98 object .99 object .94 object .97 object .91 predicted
  • Endlessly inquisitive.
  • Probably wrong about half of it.
  • Building minds that see anyway.

Essay series

Lenses

One concept. Multiple perspectives. No final answers.

  1. The pattern

    At some point I noticed that the same ideas keep surfacing across completely unrelated fields — , , , , all rediscovering each other’s concepts and giving them new names, apparently without talking to each other.

    I found that both fascinating and slightly ridiculous.

  2. The attempt

    “Lenses” is my attempt to sit at that intersection.

    It’s a series of essays exploring how we see, think, and misunderstand the world — one concept at a time, through as many angles as seem honest.

  3. The fine print

    v1.0v1.1v2.0…

    Each piece is versioned, a snapshot of my understanding when I write it, expected to change, be contradicted, or quietly embarrass me later.

    The perspectives here are a small, deliberately limited sample from the many that could exist; I’ve simply chosen not to write all of them, because infinite scroll already seems well covered as a business model.

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Latest essays

8 essays · newest first

08 · Latest essayAugust 17, 202616–23 min

Irreversibility

I have spent my entire professional life building systems with an undo button. Version control, so any commit can be reverted. Database transactions, so a failed operation rolls back cleanly. Staging environments, so nothing reaches production untested. Backups, snapshots, checkpoints, feature flags that let you disable something the moment it starts misbehaving in front of…

07July 18, 2026 · 18–27 min

Superposition

I want to exercise daily, but sometimes I can’t bring myself to start. I want to simplify my life, and I complicate it by analyzing the simplification. Some days I fantasize about a cabin on a mountain, or an island, just me and my thoughts and a total absence of other people’s opinions. Other days…

06May 9, 2026 · 17–26 min

Anchoring

I am, by temperament, allergic to first numbers. When someone tells me an apartment is worth €200,000, my immediate reaction is to assume it is worth €150,000, because anyone offering me a number on first contact has a reason for offering that specific number, and the reason is rarely my benefit. I do not take…

05April 29, 2026 · 18–28 min

Noise

I work in artificial intelligence. I should be excited about the moment we’re in. According to the industry I belong to, we are weeks away from artificial general intelligence, months away from the obsolescence of all knowledge work, and years away from a post-scarcity utopia administered by benevolent algorithms. I receive these forecasts in my…

04April 25, 2026 · 14–21 min

Projection

In the tenth grade, I bought a ring for a girl I liked. Not a metaphorical ring. An actual ring, from an actual store, with actual money I’d saved from doing nothing particularly useful — which, at sixteen, is the only kind of money available. The plan was not entirely my own: a female friend…

03April 18, 2026 · 14–21 min

Fragility

In my family, health was measured in cheek color. If you were red and round in the face, you were healthy. If you were thin, something was wrong with you and you probably needed a second lunch. This was not a fringe position. It was the consensus medical framework of an entire generation of Romanian…

02April 16, 2026 · 15–22 min

Entropy

At my workplace, there’s a gate in the courtyard. It has a lock. It has a key. For a brief, shining period in institutional history, it worked exactly as gates are supposed to work: it stayed locked, and people with keys used them. I understand this era has ended elsewhere as well. Then someone left…

01April 10, 2026 · 17–25 min

Overfitting

I have a disc protrusion — right foraminal, L5-S1, in case you need the coordinates, and you don’t, but I’m going to give them to you anyway because that’s the kind of person I am — and a shoulder that has been sending me passive-aggressive signals for months. I haven’t had the shoulder investigated yet,…

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