Masato

Last night I received the sad news of my colleague and friend Masato Hagiwara passing. I was considering writing something soon after I read his last post about language, curiosity, and life.

Masato was a deeply caring, brilliant, multi-faceted person. He was a scientist but also a musician, to some extent a linguist, always challenging the boundaries of human knowledge. There are certainly many things I don’t know about him, so if I were to choose a single word to define him, that would be “curiosity”. Even in his last days and throughout the battle with cancer, he had this child-like curiosity. There was something very gentle yet nevertheless energizing and motivating about it (it kinda reminded me of Carl Sagan in that aspect).

We intersected a lot in his passion for science. I decided to join ESP just after he and Jen-Yu interviewed me. I absolutely loved the mindset of pushing the boundaries of science, and the environment was effervescent; every meeting was sparkling with new ideas, new experiments. OMG! They code so fast! Hell yeah! I want to work with these people! We also intersected a lot regarding music. Being completely remote, we met a few times, and when it was possible, we played music. He was an excellent pianist and inclusive with less skilled musicians like me. I still play some jazz standards I was practicing before jamming with him. I will always remember Masato when playing them. I didn’t know he enjoyed a diversity of music styles from many parts of the world, and I was so happy to read that in his last post.

He was diagnosed 3 years ago, just after I joined ESP, but he decided to continue his normal life. I remember the shock of finding out about it; in my country, that diagnosis is a death sentence. Things got insanely more complicated after his daughter was diagnosed with a serious condition, fought hard, and was finally cured last year. As a parent, I can’t imagine anything more devastating. He and his family decided to approach it differently, and this can be summarized in Japanese by the word yomei, to keep living. And this was a life lesson for me. Indeed, any news can be brutal, and people often decide with this emotional charge. You learn to live your new life, and things get more stable after a while. You approach your new life with a clear mind.

Just after the diagnosis, he worked on the next generation of the AVES model, Bird-AVES, which inspired and drove our latest effort AVEX. He probably did ISPA as a thought exercise and finished it in a week in the pre-LLM era. He was super involved in larger projects like NatureLM-audio. In the past months and even weeks, he was working on a benchmark of animal knowledge expertise in LLMs. His influence on where the field is going is hard to quantify, but I think it’s underestimated at the moment. He did all this work because it was important to him, and he wouldn’t have done anything else instead.

Masato and his family decided to share their journey on the CaringBridge website. Many people do not share these life events (I am probably one of them, but more on that in another blog post). Retrospectively, I think the idea was excellent; reading about his day-to-day life helps one accept the current state of things. He liked to hang out on Zoom calls, even for a coffee, and exchange ideas. However, particularly within the last year, I didn’t dare write to him because the condition started to get more serious, and as a work colleague I thought that might be intrusive, but it was somehow reassuring reading about him on CaringBridge. I could feel his presence, although we didn’t speak as much. I hope we will never abandon his memory and legacy and the few lessons about life that he taught us.

In the past hours, I have been trying to find ways of coping with the gap that he leaves in our lives. It’s like facing the collapse of a universe of languages, music, facts, hopes, dreams. This blog post is a step towards that, following one of the many lessons I learned from Masato: being open. I am not a religious person. I can just hope to meet him in the future in a memory-less form of particles colliding in a never-ending universe where all stars are pulled apart more and more. But if the Masato we want to meet is represented by his memory, he is always with us; we can meet him every day by remembering him. So lucky to have met you, Masato!