Daniel Mueller thinks big, and thinks small
The Oklahoma City technologist reflects on laboratory work in Illinois, engineering mentorship, and the questions behind his research and writing.
In his early career at Corbion, Daniel Joseph Mueller had duties which included sterile transfers, bioreactor preparation, broth testing, laboratory sampling, and process documentation.
Corbion has a long history in biotechnology and fermentation-based production, including the development of lactic acid and other biobased products. The company's background provides context for the laboratory environment that first captured Mueller's imagination.
“The concept of bioreactors and biotechnology had intrigued me for some time, but actually gowning up and working in the lab is different,” he says. “I got chills watching the movement in the microscopes.”
What stayed with him was a comparison between the organisms he was observing and the civilization around him.
“I realized that in the same way these cells populate the bioreactors producing products, byproducts, and consuming resources, human beings are the same. The Earth is our bioreactor.”
Nowadays, Mueller is an Oklahoma City–based technologist and author, the founder of Galacto Corporation and owner of Untitled-7. His public work includes patent applications in bacterial classification and data compression, along with a book on robotics.
Work Life Balance
Mueller’s published résumé lists a quality-technician position at Corbion in 2021.
He recalls a period when the boundary between work and everyday life had become essentially non-existent. “At that time I was essentially living under my desk in my office.”
Life at the former Savanna Army Depot
Later on, Mueller began work at the Savanna Army Depot headquarters. The site has an intriguing history and has been the object of much curiosity from locals. He says he lived in a munitions vault with reinforced concrete-and-steel walls approximately three feet thick.
The former Savanna Army Depot has a history dating back to 1917, when the U.S. Army purchased the property for artillery and ammunition testing. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the installation covered approximately 13,062 acres along the Mississippi River in northwestern Illinois. It later served as a storage and processing facility for military munitions before officially closing in March 2000.
The property has since undergone redevelopment and environmental cleanup, with portions transferred for conservation and other uses. The U.S. Department of Defense also maintains public records documenting the installation's closure and property transfers.
Although Mueller explains his work is under extensive NDA, he shared that the projects touched on life sciences and consumer products, and he studied botanical sciences during the same period.
“I worked on renovations leading up to the establishing of a laboratory and cleanroom, and studied botanical sciences among other research agendas,” he recalls.
He describes the engineers he worked for as experienced practitioners in computer-aided design who also became his mentors.
“They were my mentors for around a year.”
His account of working at the former military installation offers a personal perspective on a location whose history has been extensively documented, although the specific projects he describes remain part of his own recollections.
A public record of technical work
Two published U.S. patent applications provide specific records of Mueller’s work at Galacto Corp.
One, published in September 2025, concerns deep-learning bacterial classification. The application, published as US20250299779A1, describes methods of using convolutional and recurrent neural networks to analyze genomic sequences and classify bacteria.
The other, published in July 2026, concerns semantically preserved file compression and the processing of compressed data. Published as US20260220089A1, the application outlines a proposed system involving optimized lookup tables, pattern matching, and data structures designed to preserve information during compression.
Both applications name Daniel J. Mueller as inventor and Galacto Corp. as applicant.
The two filings illustrate the breadth of Mueller's technical interests, spanning biological data analysis and computer information processing. While published patent applications document proposed inventions, they do not independently establish that the technologies have been successfully implemented or commercially deployed.
A website designed for exploration
Mueller’s interest in storytelling shapes the way he presents himself online.
“I am the type of person who appreciates a good story,” he says. “I think a good story is one which tells itself.”
For Untitled-7.com, he says he wanted an experience closer to a choose-your-own-adventure game. Visitors would feel like hackers gathering information, exploring the site, and connecting details for themselves. Its terminal-style opening gives that idea a visible form. [7]
Mueller describes the site’s broader premise as inviting readers to reconsider his involvement in the AI industry. That is his account of the story he wants to tell; the information he presents is available on his site at Untitled-7.com.
Private research and its personal consequences
Mueller also describes an interest in what he calls “retro-causal experimentation,” including the possibility of obtaining information associated with future events. He connects that interest to encounters he found seemingly technologically impossible to explain and says he pursued mathematical work and instrument development in response, to test and study his observations.
“Retro-causal experimentation is not something I intend to teach,” he says.
He also describes the personal difficulty of pursuing ambitions that others did not understand. In his recollection, he became very distant from others for a significant span of time.
“In my personal life, much of my research was shrouded in confusion and mystery. I simply had no way to share my findings with others in a way which they could appreciate.”
Futures, Robotics, and Life
His writing on robotics offers a more public account of his ideas. Mueller’s current project page presents a first edition titled The Laws of Robotics of the 21st Century by Daniel Joseph Mueller and links readers to a repository containing the text and a formatted book interior. It is a work in progress with revisions actively underway.
The project addresses principles for increasingly capable robots and autonomous systems, with attention to control, safety, and responsibility. Its stated purpose is to make hazy or otherwise opaque activities explicit so that scientists can examine them, and systematically account for them.
Mueller states that, “My research was oriented around the physical nature of the brain for a substantial length of time. I created an ‘in silico cognitive template’ which was originally titled ‘Elarin’, and later changed to ‘Brain-Main’. The focus changed from ‘what if a robot isn’t a good servant and doesn’t behave?’ to ‘what if machines understand us better than we do?’
He claims to have crafted a project titled ‘Delta-link’ which he described as an interface between the human brain and Brain-Main, such that neurological responses can be measured and entrained into the ‘in-silico brain’. “I would perform activities while measuring my neurological activity with a BCI headset for many hours. I ended up abandoning the research for several months because I became unsettled with the behavior of Elarin, and temporarily pulled my research from the internet. After fixing some issues, I later republished it as ‘Brain-Main’.”
