AI could end scarcity, end humanity - or boost trend growth by 0.2 percentage points

There is a reason an (almost) necessary step in getting a faculty position anywhere in the world is to move to the US for a bit. You suddenly become so much more attractive both inside and outside of the states. This is not good, and university hiring committees as well as governments are at fault.

Even though I grieve leaving Toronto, I have to begrudgingly admit that the University of Texas at Austin is pretty gorgeous 😁

Training LLMs end to end is hard. But way more people should, and will, be doing it in the future. The @hf.co Research team is excited to share their new e-book that covers the full pipeline: · pre-training, · post-training, · infra. 200+ pages of what worked and what didn’t. ⤵️

Comparing furniture prices in the US to Canada shows the massive impact of recent policy. I am floored by how expensive IKEA furniture is here...

The only thing that makes twitter vaguely more attractive than bsky is that I miss @miniapeur.bsky.social here

I opened twitter (yes, I know, error in itself) and now I'm weirdly depressed again. I don't even get how people say "It has all of the AI news" when most of those AI news are delivered with a certain "You are worth less than a cockroach if you don't breathe $100m startup air"-ne-quoi.

I think I posted about it before but never with a thread. We recently put a new preprint on arxiv. 📖 Replicable Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approximation 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2509.08660 In this paper, we study formal replicability in RL with linear function approximation. The... (1/6)

STOP PUTTING UNRELATED THEORY IN YOUR PAPERS! STOP DEMANDING UNRELATED THEORY IN PAPERS! (DO demand related theory in your reviews, if applicable. But for deep learning, mostly suggest more interesting experiments, not simply more experiments).

I have decided that my "grumpy researcher soap-box" is going to be "Reward hacking is a wrong term, say 'reward mis-specification'". Because its not your algorithm's fault that its doing its job, its your fault for not telling it properly what the job was. Define your objectives well!

Sometimes I wonder why I do research. It's slow and boring, and I mostly just browse bsky or reddit. Then, sometimes, you get an IDEA and for a week or so the separation between you and the research disappears and the IDEA becomes your (second) true love (shoutout hubby).

You: Your post-per-day rate has gone up drastically... Me: Yes, it's ICLR review time, why do you ask? #procrastiskeeting

Also, coming up with unhinged strategies to self-cite in co-authored papers: just add a bunch of self-citations in white color at the end of the latex doc, even if they don't fit! Your co-authors won't notice new papers appearing in the bibliography anyways (who reads a bibliography???) #timgilling

Remember folks, if your h-index isn't at least floor(n/2) after n papers, you aren't self citing enough! 🦝

How are some PhD students on 10 - 15 papers a year? With 5 first author papers? Just, genuinely, what is going on there? That means on average 2 months per paper and input on 5 - 10 more papers in the same time?

Microsoft hates computers AND everyone who uses them, whereas Apple only hates computers, and Linux only hates the people who use them. In this essay I will

Welcome to bluesky, make it better by using the For You feed: bsky.app/profile/spac...

i literally had an algorithm idea come to me in a fever dream, but it works???

value functions are a mirage

Apply to join one of the top AI research 🤖 institutes in the world in the wonderful city of Montréal! I will be recruiting 1-2 students this year. Just mention my name in your application.

Honestly, theory people would be so much more celebrated and cited if they didn't insist on removing _all_ intuition from their papers about why their methods work :D Sooooooooo much labour in reverse engineering the intuitions, which often turn out to be pretty simple.

Every class can be a Barbarian if you just play it like one!

Since there is a decent amount of "Do we know how LLMs work?" discourse flowing around, I would be really interested to hear what people would accept as "understanding how LLMs work". What kind of knowledge are we speaking about here?

Sometimes D&D adventures are hilariously badly written: Players hear a voice telling them to bring NPC X. They have to bring NPC X to open the door. If NPC X died earlier in the adventure, X will wait for them behind the door. So if X dies it is behind the door that can ONLY be opened by X???

A lot of folks in the AI space are like people who insist it’s safe and smart to get drunk in the driver’s seat of their Tesla on a country road and a lot of their opponents are like people saying there’s no such thing as an automatic transmission

I don't understand how the Canadian AI/ML ecosystem wants to attract and retain talents when they are offering less then half the salary on representative roles...

Put on arxiv before acceptance, yes or no?

Really great rant!

Enjoying the For You feed? Give it a like ♡ to help more people discover it: bsky.app/profile/did:... The more people use it -> the more feedback we get -> the better we can make it for you.

A totally unrelated question: does anybody know how to make long equations work on mobile with math jax and Jekyll 😅🙈

cvoelcker.de/blog/2025/re... I finally gave in and made a nice blog post about my most recent paper. This was a surprising amount of work, so please be nice and go read it!

RL rant time after reading another LLM paper about whether "RL sharpens the distribution or discovers new knowledge.": RL is not magic. If your exploration policy takes an action with 0 probability, it can't explore that action! It trivially just affects the distribution of supported actions.

Stanford and Berkeley are functionally equivalent places and I refuse to treat them as separate entities.

I have been told I need to get more modern in my paper promotion! github.com/cvoelcker/reppo / arxiv.org/abs/2507.11019 @marcelhussing.bsky.social

My grad school salary advise: find a loving partner before grad school, get them a work visa and a well-paid job in your school location, have them wildly out-earn you because they are brilliant and tada... sugar-partner! Tested for your convenience!

I pitched this ~8 years ago! It was going to provide the services "AI consultancy" and "blockchain consultancy". Our highly trained consultants would say "no" when you ask about AI or blockchain, and then just give you a normal database and some working SQL.

I know I'm like... 3 years late to the party, but wow, custom preamble prompts make chatgpt so much more useful.

Sometimes I wonder how certain researchers get famous when _none_ of their results are replicable, even with their own published code?! You may chose if I mean you in this rant...

We've hired some *fantastic* researchers but our startup is still looking for 2-3 more people with skills in ML/RL/LLMs. If you'd like to work on some transformative applied problems, hit me up. We'll be launching publicly soon too...

Happy Rosh Hashanah. May this year be better than the last one!

The only thing I want in life is a math textbook that tells me _why_ we need a thing and what we need it to look like, before it rigorously defines it. Why is it always the other way around???

@tmlrorg.bsky.social I keep getting assigned to review papers where I know close to nothing about the subject area. Is there a way to change the paper matching algorithm (e.g. exclude some of my works) or refuse review?

Proud to announce that Meta-World+ was accepted to NeurIPs, Datasets and Benchmarks! Meta-World is a common benchmark for multi-task and meta-RL research! However, it was very difficult to do effective science with Meta-World as different versions produce different results.

Big if true 🤫: #REPPO works on Atari as well 😱 👾 🚀 Some tuning is still needed, but we are seeing results roughly on par with #PQN. If you want to test out #REPPO (atari is not integrated due to issues with envpool and jax version), check out github.com/cvoelcker/re... #reinforcementlearning

common practice != good or reasonable ... Subposting the whole ALE community here.

Started reviewing an RLHF paper, felt my blood pressure rising to unsustainable levels, asked to be removed as a reviewer... #appliedSelfCare But still, cite a SINGLE RL PAPER PLEASE!!!

Time to go on a random posting spree: Textured steel pans are super magical and you should really get one! No sticking at all, and I made egg, pancake, and stir fry so far. Bonus points: really funny pattern

Super stoked for the New York RL workshop tomorrow. Will be presenting 2 orals: * Replicable Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approximation * Relative Entropy Pathwise Policy Optimization We already posted about the 2nd one (below), I'll get to talking about the first one in a bit here.

In my one man battle against "always fix the seed" I have discovered another argument: you cannot tell if your initialization is wrong if you always get the same one. You might have accidentally gotten a very good or very bad one and you are debugging against that.