Felix

From the moment I heard him give a talk, I knew I wanted to work with Felix. His ideas about generalization and situatedness made explicit thoughts that had been swirling around in my head, incoherent until he put them all in the right order, spoken with a passion and excitement that couldn’t help but infect those around him. His energy and brilliance were clear to anyone who spoke to him, but more than that, he made doing research feel new somehow, no matter how long we’d been making graphs and writing papers.

I was lucky enough to have worked closely with him and his team at DeepMind, on grounded language in agents and models - GLAM, as we called it cheekily. It wasn’t often that people actually wanted to attend weekly meetings, but I can honestly say that I really looked forward to our regular syncs, with our small group of GLAMours (including Andrew, Stephanie, Allison, Ishita, Jay, Aaditya, and more) as we discussed research and joked and built a community that has become one of my favorite parts of my almost 10-year career here. And that was due to Felix.

Which is why it was so shocking to see the change in him last year, when he was finally able to come to the office after his extended leave. The difference was stark - instead of barely contained energy and infectious joy, he seemed hollowed out. It was to the point that at first I had thought he had been physically sick, until he told me he’d been suffering from some rather severe depression. Until that point, I’d mainly only known Felix in a work-capacity, but I felt compelled to reach out and invite him for a coffee on the weekend. I’ve never suffered from the severity of depression or mental illness that Felix was going through, but I have been diagnosed with clinical depression since my early teens, and have managed it through a combination of psychiatric treatment and therapy for many years, to varying degrees of success. I thought maybe I had some small inkling of what he was going through. And in that simple human way we all have, I wanted to connect, and to let him know that he wasn’t alone. 

So we met on a Saturday in May at my favorite cafe in West Hampstead, and I remember it being sunny and I was running late, or he was early, as he was waiting outside for me. The transition from “close work colleague” to “perhaps friend” is always a strange one, but I thought we made some good headway that day. We talked about work stress and life stress, depression and treatment, the state of AI today, and more that I can’t remember (oh I wish I could remember). I completely sympathized with his feeling that things in our field were moving too fast and not being able to catch up. I told him how for years I suffered from imposter syndrome and horrible work anxiety. And I remember telling him that it got better (for the most part) after realizing that in life we’re not always happy in the way we think we’ll be happy. Terrible things might happen and our lives seem irrevocably changed, or maybe things just don't turn out how we planned, the future we thought we were chasing for decades disappears into smoke. But there are other ways to be happy, unexpected ways, even when we think everything’s been lost. Because that future we imagined is definitely not everything, it’s only 1 possibility out of countless others. A successful life didn’t have to only look one way. I don’t know, it sounded good in my head, but maybe it just came off trite and cliched. In any case, he nodded politely and didn’t disagree. 

I think (but can’t remember for sure) I said we should meet up again. But we didn’t. It was the last time I ever saw him, and that’s been the thing I’ve struggled most with. I wish so much that I could have seen him again and told him everything I said in the first 2 paragraphs of this post, and more. I don’t know if that would have made any difference, most likely not. But on the off chance that someone reading this is having a hard time and having trouble seeing a way out, just know that someone you know right now would gladly tell you how much you’ve meant to them if given the chance. They’d say they’re so happy they were able to reach out and connect, that they’d love to get another coffee sometime and hear how you’re doing, or just talk about nonsense, because that’s what friends do. 

I know it’s too late now, but Felix, you made a huge difference to a lot of us. We’ll miss you.

Please rest in peace.