But I am reading a long Hitchens essay from when he was still a leftist and socialist about Thomas Paine and he writes about this parody from 1791, sung to the tune of My Country ‘Tis of Thee:

Yes! Scientific papers are a rather inefficient and chaotic way of recording and consolidating scientific knowledge. I think we can do much better if we have better tools. 1/

We need new rules for publishing AI-generated research. The teams developing automated AI scientists have customarily submitted their papers to standard refereed venues (journals and conferences) and to arXiv. Often, acceptance has been treated as the dependent variable. 1/

I have many thoughts about Charlie Kirk—and perhaps even more about the white elites, including some on the left, who insist we can’t hold multiple realities at once. We can. And we must. A brief 🧵

Are you interested in #AIforConservation #AIforBiodiversity #AIforWildlife or #AIforNature?? Are you located in the Boston Area? If so, come join us!! The AI for Conservation Slack community is doing our first local-area Boston meetup, partnering with iNaturalist and TEDx Boston!

Excellent Essay by Jamelle Bouie

1/5 A poem titled "Artificial Intelligence" from 1961, dedicated to GPS (of Newell and Simon), by poet Adrienne Rich. Very prophetic, and eerily describes the how LLMs write poetry, "when they make you write your poems, later on". It is on page 136 of this book: www.amazon.com/dp/039328511...

A case study in how Cowen's uncritical use of GPT/o3 is causing him to spread misinformation on Marginal Revolution, from @pappubahry.com pappubahry.substack.com/p/misinforma...

Our August digest features: -Agentic AI with ‪@sanmayd.bsky.social‬, @tdietterich.bsky.social, @sabinehauert.bsky.social‬, Sarit Kraus, Michael Littman -‪@ijcai.org‬ 2025 -Human-centred autonomy with Haimin Hu -Flávia Carvalhido on responsible multimodal AI aihub.org/2025/08/29/a...

We've all seen generative AI video, imagery, and text, but genAI is also capable of generating a wide variety of other data types including tables, time series, financial transactions, and so on. We must move quickly to ensure digitally-signed provenance for all data objects. @c2pa.bsky.social

Let's push for the obvious solution: Dear @neuripsconf.bsky.social ! Allow authors to present accepted papers at EurIPS instead of NeurIPS rather than just additionally. Likely, at least 500 papers would move to Copenhagen, problem solved.

RKF Jr. is a dangerous man who is determined to abuse his authority to act on truly terrifying conspiracy theories and disinformation—leaving us unprepared for the next deadly pandemic and snuffing out potential cures while he’s at it. My full statement.

Sen Patty Murray (D-WA): “If there are any adults left in the White House, it’s well past time they face reality… We cannot let RFK Jr. burn what’s left of the CDC and our other critical health agencies to the ground—he must be fired.”

Separate from the commercial hype, there is still a vibrant ML research community on X, despite several of us trying to convince them to move here. One reason, perhaps, is the fierce anti-AI discourse here.

This is not the slightest bit surprising and it began prior to Trump coming back to power. As the idiot AG of Missouri was pursuing Missouri v Biden, Stephen Miller’s America First Legal sued me and my colleagues with the same forum-shopped judge and plaintiffs. Wake up: it’s a machine.

The professors are cooked web.archive.org/web/20241117...

Latest coffee corner: ‪@sanmayd.bsky.social‬, @tdietterich.bsky.social, @sabinehauert.bsky.social‬, Sarit Kraus and Michael Littman discuss agentic AI, recent developments, and lessons from the decades of research in the autonomous agents and multiagent systems community aihub.org/2025/08/15/a...

FlyBase, a Drosophila database, will lose a third of its team in early October because the Harvard grant that covered the employees’ salaries was canceled. Scientists warn that losing FlyBase could devastate fly research. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/community/ha...

New blog post: AI Allergy. On my increasing disgust with the AI discourse, even though I still like the technical and philosophical. And how I wish I could be excited about AI again. togelius.blogspot.com/2025/08/ai-a...

I’m surprised that US trading partners have not banded together and threatened a complete trade embargo on the US. Trump has so far succeeded with his divide-conquer approach

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

I signed up for self respect but got impostor syndrome instead. Bait and switch

🧠 LLMs don’t think; they 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮 thinking. Treating performance as proof is how we fall into the 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐲 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐲. Enjoyed reading this paper: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Findings from the paper that were worth my time, reflections, and takeaways ↓

@actblueorg.bsky.social‬: You should give contributors control over our information. You should also force the various campaigns and PACs to coordinate. I am only willing to look at one fundraising request per week. That includes US mail, email, and text messages.

California should pass a tax increase that exactly cancels out the BBB giveaway. Then use the money to backstop medicaid, research, Obama care, etc. They can add a condition that if BBB is repealed, the tax will go away.

There is now a path for China to surpass the U.S. in AI by Andrew Ng www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is...

The CCC has published a short white paper on promising directions for AI research. (I was one of the study participants.) cccblog.org/2025/07/31/e...

Ellie Pavlick does amazing work, congratulations on the new center.

I very much like this idea. Consider this vision:

17 of the top 20 open models on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard are made by Chinese companies. 2 from the US and 1 from Europe. This is what current domination of open models looks like, but it can be changed quickly with focused funding and effort. Leaderboard: buff.ly/hVyaNl8

😢 www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a...

On Friday, my son stayed home from school because he had a sore throat and wasn’t feeling well. He went with my husband to his office for the morning while I handled our daughter. When he came back at lunch, he was not interested in eating, saying his throat hurt too much. 1/n

I learned about this painting in high school! The paridigmatic “Manifest Destiny” painting, painted to support the U.S. white supremacy + colonial invasion idea. Where indigenous people are “savages” and all that. We felt thankful in high school that we were more informed about these things now.

@kairyssdal.bsky.social Weirdly ominous Marketplace story today on AI in perfumes. It didn't manage to tell us anything about how AI is being used in perfumes. For all I could tell, AI is just used for shipping and inventory management. 1/

I hope this sets a standard for all of the model providers

Beautifully succinct statement of the core problem with the blind application of statistical learning in AI!!

One of my former students has been a computational liver metabolism scientist at EPA for 20+ years. He took the buyout in May when it became impossible to even pretend that leadership had any interest in using science to set policy. A tragedy for all of us.

Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/prompt #smbc

Outstanding tutorial on Game-theoretic Statistics and Sequential Anytime-Valid Inference by Aaditya Ramdas at #icml-2025. Slides at stat.cmu.edu/~aramdas/icm...

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field? That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience A 🧵 1/n

So what can we do in response? A key problem: The transformation from long- to short-term funding leads researchers to flit from topic to topic, and move across fields chasing 'sexy' stories. Science is done better when you leave someone to geek out on a single topic for their whole career. 5/n

Fully open machine learning requires not only GPU access but a community commitment to openness. (Some nostalgic lessons from the ImageNet decade.)

Will AI speed up literature reviews or derail them entirely? nature.com/articles/d41... The authors advocate continually-updated evidence synthesis web resources. Excellent idea. This is a great target of the AI for Science community #ai4science

Interesting blog post on the limits of imitation learning in robotics. medium.com/@bp_64302/ph...

I think Katrien Beuls has been doing empirical research in this direction in the context of robotics.

One of the papers co-authored by her:

When two automated systems ("agents") interact, they must agree on the meaning of the symbols (json, English) that they exchange. People encounter the same problem. What discipline studies how people do this? Would love pointers to the literature 🙏

Must-read thread 👇

This is a betrayal of everything I have spent my life working on. AI *can* make a meaningful difference in drug discovery, but the idea that we can outsource regulatory approval of medicine to AI - without data from animal models - is going to do tremendous damage, to both AI and medicine.