A new player enters the arena of Foundation Models on Tabular Data: www.limix.ai - novel methods for pre-training and data generation that look highly relevant. Their evaluation on selected datasets is showing strong performance. Exciting times, looking forward to further in depth comparisons!

At #VLDB2025 London I joined a panel on Neural Relational Data. My Take: LLMs solve some data management tasks, but the next wave is Foundation Models on Relational Data and Semantically Linked Tables. More on this and further trends in #AI and #DataManagement - www.hoffart.ai/vldb-2025-ai...

Our team developing Foundation Models on Tables & Linked Business Data is looking for a new Senior Applied Research Scientist! Excited about pushing the frontier in foundation models on tabular data? Want to have business impact and academic visibility? Look no further: jobs.sap.com/job/Walldorf...

For the past 3 years, I've taught a course on Machine Learning for Climate Change to undergrads. At times, people have asked if the course lectures could be made available online. While I can't offer that, I have decided to start making "5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet" videos. Hope its useful!

Can you train a performant language model using only openly licensed text? We are thrilled to announce the Common Pile v0.1, an 8TB dataset of openly licensed and public domain text. We train 7B models for 1T and 2T tokens and match the performance similar models like LLaMA 1 & 2

Here's the full workshop handout plus annotated slides from "Building software on top of Large Language Models", a three hour tutorial I presented yesterday at PyCon US #PyConUS simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/...

I asked "on the other platform" what were the most important improvements to the original 2017 transformer. That was quite popular and here is a synthesis of the responses:

This was helpful. Also worth noting that Bluesky remains a very fraught place for AI discussions for a variety of reasons, good & bad, but with the impact of keeping a lot of the most relevant AI news, paper discussions & biggest names on X That might change, but it hasn’t yet. Still posting, tho.

It's been a couple of years since GPT-4 powered Bing, but with the various Deep Research products and now o3/o4-mini I'm ready to say that AI assisted search-based research actually works now simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/21/...

I just shared a new article, "The State of Reasoning Models", where I am exploring 12 new research articles on improving the reasoning capabilities of LLMs (all published after the release of DeepSeek R1): magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/state-of-l... Happy reading!

I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a "compressed 21st century" Here: thomwolf.io/blog/scienti... It's an extension of this interview discussion from the AI summit: youtu.be/AxBd3G0lFLs?...

When using LLM-as-a-judge, practitioners often use greedy decoding to get the most likely judgment. But we found that deriving a score from the judgment distribution (like taking the mean) works better! ❌LLM-as-a-judge with greedy decoding 😎Using the distribution of the judge’s labels

Discover European cities ✈️ while building your career! Check out the ELLIS PhD/Postdoc Program's 2025 Winter & Summer School Schedule! Dive deep into cutting-edge #AI research, learn from top researchers & connect with peers across Europe. Learn more: bit.ly/42iow66 #PhD #machinelearning

Our first release of 2025: 𝙨𝙢𝙤𝙡𝙖𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀! 💥 Main logic in ~1000 LoC 🧑‍💻 Agent writes its actions in code! LLMs are much better at writing code than current standard of writing JSON => higher perf 🌍 Any LLM support (h/t LiteLLM) 🛡️ Secure code exec (h/t E2B)

Have a look at our work on foundation models on tabular data, published today at #TRL @ #NeurIPS2024: 📜 PORTAL, an open weight and code foundation model trained on tabular data, and 📜 SALT, a real business data set containing millions of sales orders across multiple tables. Further details 👇

Wrote up my initial impressions of the new Google Gemini 2.0 Flash model - it's really good, and the streaming mode (where you can stream video and audio to it and get audio streamed right back) is pure science-fiction simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/11/...

The 3rd Table Representation Learning (TRL) workshop at NeurIPS 2024 is approaching soon ✨ Join us Saturday 14 Dec from 8:30AM for an amazing program and discussions about all things neural models + tabular data (table-representation-learning.github.io ). Not in Vancouver? Join online neurips.cc 😎

We are growing the team building the SAP Knowledge Graph and are #hiring AI & Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Knowledge Engineers and Applied Research Scientists in Germany (Berlin, Walldorf) and India (Bangalore): jobs.sap.com/search/?crea... Let's take GenAI to the next level with #KG!

Tired of saturated benchmarks? Want scope for a significant leap in capabilities? 🔥 Introducing BALROG: a Benchmark for Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games! BALROG is a challenging benchmark for LLM agentic capabilities, designed to stay relevant for years to come. 1/🧵

Great blog post from @odihq.bsky.social @esimperl.bsky.social on the current development state of #dataspaces in Europe. theodi.org/news-and-eve...

Tabular DL and AutoML podcast just dropped. For sure watching this youtu.be/3qpQ-sMRafE

Let me surface this again now that this place is more lively: Come join us at SAP in the US or Germany for a PhD Summer Internship in 2025 in Foundation Models on Structured Data, Table Representation Learning, LLMs and Knowledge Graphs! #MLInternships

Added some more folks to the Open Source AI Starter Pack: go.bsky.app/N8yVZdW

I am chairing the AI@HPI Conference: Responsible AI December 3-4 in Potsdam (Berlin metropolitan area) Discussing AI with regard to bias, elections/society, trustworthiness, copyright, the EU AI Act, and best practices. Registration: hpi.de/en/ai-hpi-co... Please spread the word!

Hi 👋 We're glad to be here on @bsky.app and looking forward to engaging in this community. But first, learn a little more about us... #ELLISforEurope #AI #ML #CrossBorderCollab #PhD

You can create your own rule-based feed with @skyfeed.app, or run a completely self-hosted feed server if you want to go fully custom. For instance, @serge.belongie.com and I just set up an ML Internship feed that collects posts by a keywords-regex and hashtag-MLinternship bsky.app/profile/did:...

Work in progress -- suggestions for NLP-ers based in the EU/Europe & already on Bluesky very welcome! go.bsky.app/NZDc31B

How do LLMs learn to reason from data? Are they ~retrieving the answers from parametric knowledge🦜? In our new preprint, we look at the pretraining data and find evidence against this: Procedural knowledge in pretraining drives LLM reasoning ⚙️🔢 🧵⬇️

Here is an initial starter pack list on Machine Learning on Graphs: go.bsky.app/HN2MTzp

All the ACL chapters are here now: @aaclmeeting.bsky.social @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social @eaclmeeting.bsky.social @naaclmeeting.bsky.social #NLProc

🚀 The 60 Accepted Papers and (tentative) Program for the 3rd Table Representation Learning workshop @NeurIPS '24 are out at: table-representation-learning.github.io! Also, reply or DM @madelonhulsebos.bsky.social if you/others should be added to the TRL researcher starterpack: go.bsky.app/4SNSMRj!

New here? Interested in AI/ML? Check out these great starter packs! AI: go.bsky.app/SipA7it RL: go.bsky.app/3WPHcHg Women in AI: go.bsky.app/LaGDpqg NLP: go.bsky.app/SngwGeS AI and news: go.bsky.app/5sFqVNS You can also search all starter packs here: blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack...

I created a starter pack of scientists in the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) 🇪🇺 Please ping me and I‘ll add you. go.bsky.app/Cihupkk

WIP starterpack w researchers on Table Representation Learning (TRL): all things related to representation learning and generative models for e.g. tables, DBs, spreadsheets! I'll curate but DM/reply w handle+some info welcome! Also follow @trl-research.bsky.social for updates 🤗 go.bsky.app/4SNSMRj

We are looking for PhD summer interns for 2025 in the area of Foundation Models on Structured Data, Table Rep Learning, LLMs and Knowledge Graphs. If you want to work on groundbreaking research on the richest business data available, please reach out to me or apply here: jobs.sap.com/job/Berlin-P...