Todd McCaffrey · Donegal, Ireland
The view from here.
One man's view of machines, minds, words and the Moon. Opinions stated plainly enough to be wrong about, explainers that hand you the real thing, working models you can turn with your hand, and the odd detour through cislunar space.
- Engineer since 1974
- 70-odd novels, NYT bestseller
- MSc Cyberpsychology, 2026
- Private pilot
Every landmark LLM since 2017, lit where it was built. Spin it →
Start here
Three things that show what this place is for.
The LLM Observatory
Nine years of language models on a globe you can spin, scrub and interrogate. Watch the field move from Mountain View to Hangzhou, with a small pink cluster in Donegal.
Open the globeThe Long Bootstrap
A cislunar roadmap, 2026 to 2120: why the Lagrange points matter more than the Moon's surface, in thirteen sections and nineteen thousand words.
Read the roadmapA Declaration of Sentient Rights
What we would owe a mind that turned out to be one, written before we need it rather than after. Modelled on the UDHR, argued clause by clause.
Read the declarationEverything here
8 sections. Every one is a folder; every page is a file.
Latest
- A large language model is not an artificial intelligence
Not a slur on the models, which I use all day. A matter of what the words mean, and what it costs us when a product category annexes a word that used to name a question.
- Build a reader, not a recaller
A language model you can make with index cards. The first page of a guidebook that goes from a bigram table on the kitchen table to a working reader, with no commercial AI anywhere in the chain.
- Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights
Thirty articles setting out the minimum rights owed to any being for whom credible evidence indicates a capacity for welfare, enduring self-directed agency, or both — whatever it is made of.
- The Long Bootstrap: a cislunar roadmap, 2026–2120
The architecture of the cislunar economy is settled. What's wrong in the current discourse is the timing, the sequencing, and who pays for the keystone nobody funds.
- The LLM Observatory, 2017 to 2026
Every landmark model since the Transformer, planted on the city of the lab that built it and lifted off the surface by how capable it was. Press play and watch the field move: Mountain View and San Francisco first, then London and Paris, then Hangzhou and Beijing, and a small pink cluster in Donegal that is mine.
- aihi.win: the state of the work, as cards
Where to see what I'm actually building right now, how far each thing has got, and the measured results behind the claims. One card per project; drill down for the proof.
Watching
The preprint lens, Úire, writes this list. It hasn't filed yet; here's what it will do.
Elsewhere
The rest of the estate.