Xyra Sinclair

I've been oriented to epistemic infrastructure for years since leaving the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2019.

I worked on my own software including prior elicitation systems and probabilistic graphical spreadsheets (e.g. prolly). I incorporated ExoPriors in December 2024 and started making the internet SQL queryable for agents in December 2025.

When Opus 4.5 came out, I felt the incredible pressure to make something happen, and rented a dedicated server before I knew what to do with it. Within a week, I knew that the somehow novel, profoundly useful thing I could do, would be to give people's agents arbitrary SQL+vector access over much important online content, like arXiv and LessWrong. I locked in harder than I ever have in my life, prompting over 12 hours a day, and delivered. I reposted Scry on HackerNews and got 350+ upvotes.

• by early 2024 I decided that I needed to live so as to realize most of my expected impact on AI x-risk by the end of 2026, because after that, AI outcomes would be presumed to be largely locked in. And maybe that wouldn't be the median case, but as an uncommonly strategic strong longtermist, I had to be strong enough to worry about say, that 10-20% of early tail outcomes. In August 2024 I was facing the tough reality that I just didn't seem productive enough to reliably realize a significant fraction of my potential impact (e.g. I could not build my startup software fast enough, my nuclear alignment continuity work was not going anywhere). There was this old silly problem of "emotions" plaguing me--if only there was a pill to just magically make all your inner gunk go away (now I understand to be a very naive view of how things work). I was trying somatic therapy and was making some progress but had to accept that it just wasn't reliably working fast enough, and that something drastic would have to happen. Women tend to process their emotions better, so yeah I figured I could try estrogen, maybe 20% chance I like it and want to stay on it long term, but I figured there was a decent chance I could take it for 3-5 months and cry out lots of debilitating suppressed grief and then go back to testosterone dominance. So yeah I started estrogen in OCT 2024, and immediately got so much more than I bargained for, and haven't wanted to go back, although I have experimented a bit with exogenous testosterone. I don't know about gender identity, but I know that I deeply love dropping into my body and relating to the world with less armor. The old scripts I was being run by just weren't actually a decent fit for the world I found myself in, so I've faced a lot of ego death and have been finding increasing lightness and wellbeing in daily life.

• as a kid went down all black diamonds with no poles my first day skiing (Wisconsin tho), swam class III rapids in 45°F water, sat off the front of the boat on class IV rapids holding myself down simply with a D ring between my legs. I tend to be much more responsible about risks nowadays, but I think rationalist/nerds tend to underrate the knowingness that can arise that you are actually safe in certain intense situations.
• my public arts middle and high school didn't have sports (although I was on the competitive varsity ballroom dance team) so I did distance running on my own, working up to multiple marathons at 15
• honor grad of Army dive school, which involves simulated drowning, cutting steel underwater with a 10,000° F exothermic lance, and seeing lots of folks including former D1 swimmers quit (85% of my cohort failed out and got reclassed).
• I genuinely craved to be a battalion commander within a few months at my first unit at 19 yo. I was able to be appointed to an E-6 position working directly with the top-3 (CO, 1LT, 1SG) as an E-3.
• competed on West Point's premier military skills competition team and then the Triathlon team. like 5:30 am swims, 15 hours of steady-state cardio a week plus practice logistics time, on top of my ~22 semester hour course load and multitude of cadet duties. my body was quite fast twitchy for triathlon too which meant it was really easy for me to overly damage body by going too lactic. after 10 months on the West Point triathlon team, days after I did my sub 5 hour half-ironman and 1:28 half marathon, I deadlifted 335 lbs (2.2x bw).
• was an international sperm donor (wanted to get over instinct to have kids that could sway my EA ambitions, and perhaps increase the richness of my life with a minor co-parenting role that some women are into) and dated and lived with a wonderful woman 18 years older than me.
• came up with some solid optimizations for hardware streaming top-k sorting networks that save vast majority of dynamic power for large k. not a hardware jockey but in another life...