Neal Zhang

You know Guy from Free Guy? The NPC who wakes up one day, realizes the whole world around him is a system — and instead of just going along with it, starts rewriting the rules and building something of his own?

That’s kind of my story. I spent a decade as a Product Manager — shipping AI safety at Meta, scaling educational games at Age of Learning, optimizing ad monetization at Zynga, building recommendation systems at Microsoft AI. I was good at playing the game.

Then I woke up to agentic AI. I saw that the systems I’d been building products around were starting to build themselves. And like Guy putting on the sunglasses for the first time, I couldn’t unsee it.

Now I’m building my own agentic systems and researching how machines remember things. By day I’m a Principal PM at Microsoft AI. By night I’m hacking on agents, memory architectures, and whatever weird idea won’t let me sleep.

This site is my world outside the game. Projects, thoughts, and the occasional movie take. Welcome to the Free Guy era.