Tom Meyer
Attention is all you need — both kinds.
One career at the machine end of the word — the first generative content shipped at Facebook, language models at Meta scale, augmented reality from the camera to the headset. One life at the human end of it — a dozen languages read side by side, a yoga mat, slow attention to the things that don't scale. This site is where they meet.
Lately, in a single season and with AI agents doing much of the lifting, I made three games and a novel. They'll land here, one at a time.
A few things I was early to
- The first Java interactive ad banners on the web.
- Technical director of the first feature-length film on the internet.
- Co-author of the VRML 2.0 standard, and VR for NASA.
- Dropbox's Android app, built from zero, as employee #16.
- The first generative content — and the first on-device deep learning — shipped at Facebook.
- Language models turned against hate speech, at global scale, at Meta.
What I'm making now
- Lord of the Swarm coming
A god-mode real-time strategy game.
- Glass Bead Game coming
Multiplayer strategy for very human minds — and, it turns out, for AI agents too.
- A Vision Quest coming
A game that sees the real world through your phone's camera.
- Bit Parts novel · coming
A novel about a mind recorded, copied a billion times, and set loose to find itself.
Writing
- A new home at tom.to
- Interactive islands: live widgets in a static page
- An Engineering View of the Meta “Hateful Conduct” Changes
- Soft Skills for Engineers (Part 2)
- Soft Skills for Engineers