BREAKING: Social Security Administration chief data officer and whistle-blower Charles Borges has resigned after bombshell report that SSA put highly-sensitive data at risk. He sent out an email to colleagues moments ago. Here is the text of his email shared with me:

The Common Crawl Foundation, MLCommons, EleutherAI, and John Hopkins' Center for Language and Speech Processing have the pleasure of inviting you to register for the 1st shared task on Language Identification for web data. commoncrawl.org/blog/wmdqs-s...

Fair use is what enables quote-dunking. It's what lets you make fun of elected officials by quoting their own words back at them. It's what allows gifs to exist in the first place. It's what makes software interoperable. It underpins literally everything online.

We discovered something counterintuitive: the best way to find policy ambiguities is to create subtly distinct versions of your policy, then see where AI interprets them differently. Those mismatches reveal your problem spots. Systematic, repeatable, effective. But still manual. 🧵 4/7

as you can see, grok doesn't actually present any consistent belief, grok will say anything support your local jewish transgender catgirl hackers

The funny thing about the Superman freakout is that Kal-El isn't "just" an undocumented immigrant. He is a refugee who fled a planet that was literally dying. His creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were first generation Jews whose parents had fled persecution in Eastern Europe.

We are launching a new speaker series at EleutherAI, focused on promoting recent research by our team and community members. Our first talk is by @catherinearnett.bsky.social on tokenizers, their limitations, and how to improve them.

Remarkable. MSNC: "I want to reiterate this has been 100% peaceful." Seconds later, LA County sheriffs start firing on the crowd. Yet again, "law enforcement" deliberately escalated.

Kristi Noem: "We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city." Sen. Alex Padilla is then forcibly removed!

The project of open science for machine learning only works if we are able to distribute the training data. Openly licensed data lets us do that, under mild conditions. We make sure to provide document-level metadata for authorship, licensing information, links back to the originals, and more.

Reminder that attacking Jews around the world because of the actions of the state of Israel is definitionally antisemitic.

About Copyright Office AI report: many things to say about it (108p!) but let's start with: memorization in machine learning studies IS NOT the same thing as a copy in IP law. It *may* be an IP-law copy, but it does not have to be, and that distinction somehow got lost in the heated discourse

Our statement on the "firing" of the Register of Copyrights and the termination of Dr Carla Hayden.

extremely relatable, no one has ever seen anything like it

New Ed Martin letter—this time to Wikipedia about its tax-exempt status. In it, he asks about topics including its editorial practices, editor anonymity, "hateful content and conduct by editors," and content used to train LLMs. www.thefp.com/p/trump-pros... Letter: drive.google.com/file/d/1ocNy...

gonna watch White House OSTP Director Kratsios give the Trump administration’s inaugural technology policy address and live skeet it here :)

To believe in right-wing gender politics you have to believe that gender is simultaneously something so completely innate and synonymous with biological sex that it could never possibly be otherwise, and also so tenuous and anxious that even a life of material comfort can threaten that identity.

Cory Booker is on the senate floor explaining the AI Act’s Code of Practice

Welcome to Donald Trump’s trade policy. Nobody knows anything. 54/n

Are you tired of context-switching between coding models in @pytorch.org and paper writing on @overleaf.com? Well, I’ve got the fix for you, Neuralatex! An ML library written in pure Latex! neuralatex.com To appear in Sigbovik (subject to rigorous review process)

ope-sec in the midwest

OOPSEC

so the air strikes in Yemen were actually about making Europe say thank you

Signal's a great app to keep your communications secure, but make sure you know the identities of the users in your group chats. Our SSD guide on how to use Signal includes guidance on managing your group chat preferences.

I helped build a government AI system. DOGE fired me, rolled the AI out to the whole agency, and implied the AI can do my job and the jobs of the others they've fired. It can't. But, what DOGE accidentally revealed about themselves in the process is fascinating. 🧵

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is back again this week: The TAKE IT DOWN Takedown. @benwhitelaw.bsky.social is back this week and we discuss the TAKE IT DOWN Act and why it's a weapon, not a law (thanks @thedextriarchy.bsky.social). Also the new book about Meta... podcast.ctrlaltspeech.com/2315966/epis...

TODAY at 2:30 PM: @eleutherai.bsky.social is at #SXSW! What is open source AI and how are policymakers thinking about it in 2025? I'm on a panel joined by great lawyers from @databricks.bsky.social, Meta, and @mofollp.bsky.social 2:30-3:30 pm Hilton Austin Downtown, 4th Floor, Salon C

It was great to speak to @chronphilanthropy.bsky.social about AI research and how it's challenging yet necessary for non-profits to work in the LLM space. Many think we should leave the field to companies, but non-profits have different values and goals and those are important. shorturl.at/8IlmF

Proud to be at the AI Action Summit representing @eleutherai.bsky.social and the open source community. The focus on AI for the public good is exciting! DM me or @aviya.bsky.social to talk about centering openness, transparency, and public good in the AI ecosystem.

update on the trip to Paris

Excited to share I’ll be in Paris Feb 5-13. Feb 6-7 I’m presenting a poster at the inaugural conference of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss open source & AI, or meet up at Rue Saint-Éleuthère (yes this is a real street).

i feel like Elon Musk endorsing AfD two months before the German elections should have been a bigger story

the actually surprising part of this screenshot is openAI's paper defining "clear superhuman performance" as "> 95th percentile" like come on that's not what the word SUPERhuman means

blessed to discover the "Things People Blame the Jews For" series owing to its very strong 72nd installment

I made a starter pack for @eleutherai.bsky.social and friends of open source, tell me who else I should add go.bsky.app/UMAyU65

earlier this year someone recommended Hostile Epistemology by C. Thi Nguyen to me — thank you so much! (We are probably mutuals and I'm so sorry I forgot where or with whom this interaction happened.)

“Reconciling that it’s our duty to acknowledge reality and that saving face by fooling ourselves keeps the world spinning” is a great description of what it’s like to do policy at @eleutherai.bsky.social :P Not on accident — this is already how IP law operated in tech before “genAI” became popular

follow @lu.is and you too may learn fascinating (and sometimes horrifying) ways laws already on the books shape current tech policy issues (Threads has different Mastodon interop for EU because of GDPR?!)

oh no my precious skeets

okay I have to admit there’s something very cool about this place

Here is a list of ML OSS & Open Source / Science enthusiasts I found on Bluesky 🦋 go.bsky.app/8MFcfXd Let me know if you find such people here! I'm still new here and probably the list misses many must-add people, so let's built it together💪

I made a starter pack for @eleutherai.bsky.social and friends of open source, tell me who else I should add go.bsky.app/UMAyU65