Great set of events for #SeattleAIWeek this week! Definitely join some if you are in town and let me know if you want to catch up luma.com/Seattle-AI-W...

🚀 New release: cloudpathlib v0.23.0 🥧 Now with Python 3.14 (π) support! 📁 New copy & move methods mean you can reduce usage of shutil 🎉 Check out the full release and docs here: 👉 cloudpathlib.drivendata.org/stable/

Super interesting work on new proposed columnar data file format called F3 with embedded wasm binary to decode the data 🤯 (which obviates the need for 3rd party library support). Favorable comparisons on compression, throughput and random reads to existing formats. db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2025/...

Very cool to see Wikimedia embracing LLM tools and launching a hybrid similarity search API and open source embeddings for Wikipedia! Also supports Q&A style queries. www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidat...

Interesting to see empirical research coming out for LLMs as education aids. In this study, active use of LLMs helped CS students debug compiler errors. Removing LLM access demonstrated no lasting learning benefit from having had access to it... learninganalytics.upenn.edu/ryanbaker/IC...

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!

We just shipped two major features for cloudpathlib ✨📦 ✨ ! First, http support—treat an URL like any other path (open, read_text, join). Second, compatibility with open and os Python built-ins for seamless transition of legacy code and third-party library support. cloudpathlib.drivendata.org

Great opportunity to work on AI in conservation and biodiversity with Roland Kays! In-person in NC, check it out now since it is only open for a week: www.governmentjobs.com/careers/%7B0...

Exemplary FAQ for "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt" www.brainonllm.com/faq I'd love to see more authors who are explicit about what NOT to claim based on a study, including wording for lay audiences that is not appropriate.

Thought I would spot check a application someone was posting about 100% vibecoding. Can you spot the issue? Kudos to the LLM, this is verbatim from the fastapi docs. Sometimes verbatim from the docs is not what you want for your application though....

Interesting announcement on a product from Astral! Similar model to one of the core @anacondainc.bsky.social lines of business.

Enthusiastic to build on this generation of earth observation foundation embeddings like DeepMind's AlphaEarth (and more)! We already see some promising crop type (cereals vs. orchards) results and are exploring other use cases in climate resilience. deepmind.google/discover/blo...

Very cool to see that marimo supports our cloudpathlib library for their file browser UI! Browse your S3, GCS, Azure buckets from your notebooks! docs.marimo.io/api/inputs/f...

✨ 📦 ✨ Just released new Cookiecutter Data Science version with support for pixi and poetry as environment managers! Some of our top requested features ever. Upgrade and check it out now. cookiecutter-data-science.drivendata.org

Now getting organic inbound for www.zambacloud.com, our wildlife imagery processing platform, from ChatGPT! 😲

Just in case you thought speech-to-text worked for children, the third column is what Whisper does. Somehow in the third example it accesses my inner monologue... I guess that's why we're excited about our upcoming challenge! kidsasr.drivendata.org

How are people managing code review for their AI coding agents? I do a first glance and it is obviously bad (e.g., didn't refactor repeated code), and now I've got half a dozen AI diffs for things that aren't good enough cluttering up my todo list with things to respond to....

New research based on the CANDOR corpus shows that people enjoy conversations where they alternate longer turns better than short turns or one person dominating. Cool! arxiv.org/html/2506.20...

The best shortcut to how many experienced software engineers feel about AI is listening to the Primeagen's takes. Balanced perspectives on what's actually new, determinism, security, system complexity, what's promising, and what's not www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDWa...

"Damn ChatGPT" your new summer jam about using ChatGPT as a therapist open.spotify.com/track/4umq06... (edited)

Great article on the challenges of only surfacing the right info to LLMs and editing down what is not needed. If you've used a coding copilot or agent, you've seen this first hand many times. Output iterations are often polluted with code that came before. www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/22/h...

BioCLIP2 looks like a stellar improvement! I'm excited to think about integrating into Zamba to for open-ended classification tasks run at scale on camera trap imagery. Definitely the potential to dramatically improve CT image utility. imageomics.github.io/bioclip-2/

"Munchable" is GenZ cringe. www.propublica.org/article/insi...

We've built so many low-fidelity prototypes in our HCD work. IMO vibecoding changes the feel of those prototypes, but doesn't change the process. Ask any designer—they'll tell you high-fidelity first iterations are often more distracting to clients than helpful. www.semafor.com/article/06/0...

Check out this LLM circuit trace LLM for the text: '"The statement 'this statement is false' is." It goes through a logical contradictions node, but still outputs either "true" or "false" with the highest probabilities... www.anthropic.com/research/ope...

A new preprint shows anonymization techniques for voices make transcription accuracy substantially worse for children versus adults. This is going to be a big challenge as we work on ASR for educational settings where we emphatically need both privacy and accuracy. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00100

😍 Incredible data storytelling about the power of conversation and human connection. Worth a read for good vibes! Based on the CANDOR corpus that we worked on. pudding.cool/2025/06/hell...

The gap between LLM prototype and production strikes again... in the worst possible place. www.propublica.org/article/trum...

📷 This week's @esaearth.esa.int #EarthFromSpace is a #Copernicus Sentinel-3 visible image of a thick plume of orange dust from the Sahara Desert over approximately 150 000 sq km of the eastern Atlantic Ocean on 7 May 2025🧪🌍 www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

Very cool to see the multimodal conversation CANDOR dataset that we worked on used for a new paper on conversational agents! Gets agent feedback/training loops closer to the 7-38-55 rule than text only arxiv.org/abs/2505.15922

You don't need to be a coder to use AI for wildlife research! 💻➡️🚫 With Zamba Cloud's new image support, simply upload photos, get species IDs, and even train custom models—all without writing a single line of code. www.zambacloud.com #WildlifeResearch

A nurse shark takes a leisurely stroll through Coral City against a backdrop of thriving staghorn, elkhorn, brain, finger, and star corals #nurseshark #sharksofcoralcity #shark #leisurelystroll #elkhorn #staghorn #braincoral #coral #coralcitycamera #miami #portmiami #biscaynebay #coralcity

What about the fact-checked news content?

Foundation models for geospatial aren't there yet. This piece argues that unlike with language the information density of labeled data, and pretraining tasks aren't relevant enough. Worth a read if you do any geo AI christopherren.substack.com/p/geospatial...

People keep plugging AI "Co-Scientists," so what happens when you ask them to do an important task like finding errors in papers? We built SPOT, a dataset of STEM manuscripts across 10 fields annotated with real errors to find out. (tl;dr not even close to usable) #NLProc arxiv.org/abs/2505.11855

This is a huge announcement for privacy-focused developers that don't want to do API calls, but the caniuse.com for built-in LLMs across browsers is going to be a shitshow. www.theverge.com/news/669528/...

I got access to Gemini Diffusion, Google's first diffusion LLM, and the thing is absurdly fast - it ran at 857 tokens/second and built me a prototype chat interface in just a couple of seconds, video here: simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/...

PSA to test suites with HTTP servers on Windows: localhost can be 100x slower than 127.0.0.1! 🤯 I hit the issue on a new cloudpathlib feature for HTTP that's coming soon github.com/drivendataor... Nearly impossible to debug. More background here medium.com/hackernoon/h...

I say this a lot, but the narrative that AI use is going to collapse due to data limits or costs or environmental factors or regulation or a "hype bubble" popping or whatever is not a useful position for critics. Capability development may slow (it hasn't done so yet), but AI use isn't going away.

typical corrupt science

YES. This is the practical guide for building LLM products that is not polluted by hype. Start on the slides and then play with the workshop code. simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/...

Chatbot benchmarks are proliferating and getting cited with every new release. We're thinking about the overlap between benchmarks and challenge leaderboards (www.drivendata.org/competitions/). Need to make better ones for social sector tasks to push model releases towards what matters.

AI alone won't change the social sector. I put down a few thoughts spurred at #GTF2025 on what other infrastructure—technical and social—we need to make AI work. Let me know your thoughts! www.linkedin.com/pulse/tech-i...

Great conversation with Josh Tobin and Sam Charrington on TWIML about how OpenAI thinks about agents. Great for building intuitions about how those tools should work. twimlai.com/podcast/twim...

We need LLM benchmarks with the same lessons we learned from ML challenges. Absolutely private test sets, submissions can only be selected based on public score, number of subs limited. Even with these, value decays over time.

😍 New DrivenData Labs data services site is LIVE! So much easier to find what we do and see our history of work. Come check it out (and let me know if you see any issues!). drivendata.co

GDAL 3.11 released 🚀 github.com/OSGeo/gdal/r...

Learned at #CNG2025 about some great torchgeo improvements, including more out of the box datasets and pretrained weights. Looking forward to experimenting! - 📦 torchgeo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ap... - 🏋️ torchgeo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ap...

Excited to be with the DD team in Utah. Heading today to talk geo data tools at #CNG2025. If you're at cloud native geo, say hi! Would love to talk ML competitions, social impact tools, foundation models, python libraries and more!