Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

In a sort-of social experiment, instead of assigning "reviewers" to the submitted papers, we assigned "mentors". Although the job content was the same, the quality of the reviews and the satisfaction of the authors improved quite significantly (even those whose paper was rejected). Think about it.

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

instructions for air travel

My views on "agentic" here in this AP article on "agentic AI" apnews.com/article/agen...

As skepticism of AI deepens, we keep coming back to this Gary Marcus interview from May — where he argued OpenAI would be “the WeWork of AI.” @cnbc.com @garymarcus.bsky.social www.cnbc.com/video/2024/0...

👉Softbank sells entire Nvidia position. 👉Oracle debt downgraded. 👉Meta financing games revealed. 👉OpenAI CEO @sama couldn’t explain how company would meet its $1.4 T obligations. 👉Coreweave drops 20% in a week. You do the math.

Scientists and scholars in AI and its social impacts call on von der Leyen to retract #AIHype statement. @olivia.science @abeba.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @rocher.lc @danmcquillan.bsky.social @robin.berjon.com & many others have signed www.iccl.ie/press-releas...

This NeurIPS workshop claims that LLMs "provide an important foundation for exploring human cognition, emotion, and social interaction" This is flawed logic, as @lmesseri.bsky.social and I argue here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It is time to abandon student evaluations of teaching Comment by Gordon Hodson (@gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social) Web: go.nature.com/4jfAzXo PDF: rdcu.be/ef9y5

geography, logic, and counting

www.csoonline.com/article/4077... Whenever I run a meeting that has minutes I always read the draft minutes before sharing - I guess this becomes even more important if the meetings are being generated by a stochastic parrot 🦜 …

Whether you’re an AI skeptic, an AI evangelist, or just someone who wants to know what’s happening on the cutting edge of tech, you should be reading @garymarcus.bsky.social. Vibe coding? It’s dying. I am shocked. SHOCKED, I tell you. garymarcus.substack.com/p/is-vibe-co...

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

IFAAMAS, the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, is pleased to announce the call for the 2025 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award. The award includes a certificate and a 1500 EUR payment. Submission link: forms.gle/xzfax1VCTVim... #AAMAS2026

The abstracts submission deadline for the main technical tracks is fast approaching! Don't miss your chance to present your research in Cyprus and connect with top experts in Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems🔔 📅 Submission deadline: October 1, 2025 #AAMAS2026 #Cyprus #AutonomousAgents

1971 #ACMTuringAward recipient John McCarthy was born #OTD in 1927. Dr. McCarthy's lecture, "The Present State of Research on Artificial Intelligence" is a topic that covers the area in which he has achieved considerable recognition for his work. amturing.acm.org/award_winner...

Described accessibly (Hopefully) in a Conversation article.

My article Interlinked Computing in 2040: Safety, Truth, Ownership and Accountability has just won the journal's best paper award ( www.computer.org/publications... )

A reminder that the 70+ year-old research discipline of AI is much bigger than genAI, much bigger than just deep learning, much bigger than Big Tech. AI includes symbolic reasoning, multi-agent systems and statistical machine learning and is used for astrophysics, renewable energy and climate models

Adding AI watermark to latest paper...

The 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems is coming to Cyprus this year. youtu.be/aAGHxUPZInY #AAMAS2026 #Cyprus #AutonomousAgents

Position (permanent): Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Information Management at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. My school is advertising for an academic position. (1/2)

Framing of AI safety as primarily about x-risk has 3 drawbacks: 1.Excludes researchers with different perspectives about what AI safety is and why we should care about 2.Misleads public about the field's scope and necessity 3.Creates resistance to build safe AI systems from those skeptical of x-risk

Our paper "AI safety for everyone" with Balint Gyevnar is out at Nature Machine Intelligence: www.nature.com/articles/s42... We challenge the narrative that AI safety is primarily about minimizing existential risks from AI. Why does this matter?

Delighted to share our most recent paper: "A Scoresheet for Explainable AI" (with John & Sebastian). It will be presented at @aamasconf.bsky.social later this month. 🎬 Short YouTube summary (5 minutes): www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCpf... 📝 Link to the paper on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2502.098...

Here is how I have been comparing the two big hype phenomena in AI and robotics, in my recent talks. Spoiler alert: the hype is unfounded.

OpenAI: "Users have told us that understanding how the model reasons ... helps build trust in its answers." Anthropic: "Do reasoning models accurately verbalize their reasoning? Our new paper shows they don't." www.anthropic.com/research/rea...

AI Hype: The phenomenon where experts without expertise hype up imminent arrival of expertise without experts. #AIAphorisms

👇 “If we mediate our writing through AI, we mediate our relationships through AI. We risk losing the very reason for why we write: To communicate, with others.”

I was a member of the panel that produced this report. All of us have spent our careers working on AI. Amongst the hypesters that is probably seen as a disqualification for understanding anything about AI. gizmodo.com/ai-experts-s...

Ascribing emotions to ChatGPT (or other LLMs) makes no sense. Just because a piece of software generates English text does not mean it functions like a human (spoiler: it doesn't). That this passes for journalism is really unfortunate.

Call for papers! 🎉 If you have felt confused about evaluation in explainable AI, this workshop is for you! We are excited to go to Bologna @ ECAI'25 as we try to build better methods for evaluating XAI. Can't wait to see what ideas the community will bring! sites.google.com/view/excd-20...

Have truly lost patience with the New York Times’ editorial coverage of AI, which has basically degenerated into industry cheerleading. They are completely misrepresenting what most academics believe about AGI. I detail some blunders here: open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

Top notch. "discourse about large models as intelligent agents is fundamentally misconceived. ... Large Models should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents, but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated."

Sitting in SFO United Club with a Bear robot wandering about for people to put dirty dishes on. Has been here for two years. I built the first robot that could safely roll around among people 40 years ago at MIT. This is how long it takes to get from demos of technology to deployment. Remember that.

ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award 2025 goes to Prof. Shlomo Zilberstein for his work on decentralized Markov Decision Processes used in decision-theoretic planning in multi-agent systems and multi-agent reinforcement learning. sigai.acm.org/main/2025/03... #SIGAIAward