I was lucky to get a sneak preview of Advait’s talk and it is SO GOOD. I wish everyone building AI would watch this.

The problem is us, with our Paleolithic vulnerabilities, our FOMO, our susceptibility to snake oil salesmen and the ELIZA effect. Say no to anthropomorphized tech solutionism and yes to stronger human institutions, fortified by ordinary technology. (11/11)

“To leave our students to their own devices — which is to say, to the devices of AI companies — is to deprive them of...the means to understand the world they live in or navigate it effectively,” Anastasia Berg writes. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/o...

I cannot wait to celebrate TWENTY YEARS of #WiML at #NeurIPS in San Diego this December! 🎉🥳 Fun fact: The first #WiML was held in San Diego back in 2006! ❤️ Share your memories below, and come hang out on Dec 2! I will be there! I will be speaking! And have I mentioned I AM EXCITED?!?!?!

Nice writeup in @caltech.edu news about the impact of the #Visipedia project in Computer Vision and Citizen Science

Not being an AI-doomer, but having experienced in my own department over the past 7 years a steady erosion of faculty governance norms and diminished prioritization of research-oriented pedagogy, this tracks. Let faculty and faculty interests lead the way, rather than administrators/regents

We (UC Irvine) are hiring for a faculty position (any level) in AI/ML/vision/NLP/etc. If you would like to work in a great department with great colleagues please apply! and please distribute to students, researchers, faculty who may be interested. More info here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ZyY5...

Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

📣 Please share: We invite submissions to the 29th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (#AISTATS 2026) and welcome paper submissions at the intersection of AI, machine learning, statistics, and related areas. [1/3]

Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.

Our computer vision textbook is now available for free online here: visionbook.mit.edu We are working on adding some interactive components like search and (beta) integration with LLMs. Hope this is useful and feel free to submit Github issues to help us improve the text!

I've heard this personally from multiple PMs at AI companies. Students are one of the biggest demographics and they need to "break in" and have even more usage to improve their metrics. Classic corporate economic incentives

This Senate proposal advanced by Sen Cruz would cancel new and existing State laws on any aspect of tech use including civil rights, consumer protection, privacy, fraud, safety for kids, accessibility, and more. In short, we’d lose the few laws we have that ensure responsible AI use. #killthebill

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

Llama 3.1 70B contains copies of nearly the entirety of some books. Harry Potter is just one of them. I don’t know if this means it’s an infringing copy. But the first question to answer is if it’s a copy at all/in the first place. That’s what our new results suggest: arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546

A call for scientists to stand up for scientific freedom as well as funding: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@candicemorey.bsky.social and I were just talking about this. Students, I think, are still (rightly) nervous about submitting LLM-produced work, but they are using it to summarise papers they struggle to read. And it shows in their subsequent writing. It's "just reading the abstracts", but worse.

Because we must build good things while we scream about the bad, I have started a "Data for Good" team @data-for-good-team.bsky.social that partners with organizations needing short-term data science help. We have three projects ongoing & will add more as our capacity grows. data-for-good-team.org

Congratulations to Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto on receiving the Turing Award in recognition of their significant contributions to ML. I also stand with them: Releasing models to the public without the right technical and societal safeguards is irresponsible. www.ft.com/content/d8f8...

My new paper "Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different": arxiv.org/abs/2503.02113. Generalization behaviours in deep learning can be intuitively understood through a notion of soft inductive biases, and formally characterized with countable hypothesis bounds! 1/12

There are a bunch of published papers referencing “vegetative electron microscopy” because of Generative AI retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/v...

I'm very excited to share notes on Probabilistic AI that I have been writing with @arkrause.bsky.social 🥳 arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05244 These notes aim to give a graduate-level introduction to probabilistic ML + sequential decision-making. I'm super glad to be able to share them with all of you now!

What should we teach our undergrads about machine learning? I wrote up some ideas for restructuring Machine Learning 101.

1/8. This week I had a few different conversations with scholars who, in the face of the attacks on science and institutions of learning in the U.S., are wondering what to do. One suggestion I have is: keep doing your work. It matters in and of itself. Why do I say that? A few reasons.

Microsoft's own research confirms something that was already pretty obvious: relying on a text generating machine to come up with answers erodes critical thinking, and is a method favoured by those who never liked doing critical thinking in the first place advait.org/files/lee_20...

When I was in graduate school, nothing in the world felt more important to me than publishing a paper in the scientific literature. It was not about getting a job or competing with my peers. It was about being part of something vastly larger than myself and profoundly meaningful human history.

New postdoc position open at UCI to work at the intersection of machine learning and climate science, jointly between Stephan Mandt's group and my group. More details and application information here: ics.uci.edu/~smyth/postd... Feel free to share.

How do LLMs interpret expressions of linguistic uncertainty such as "highly unlikely"? Short answer: pretty well .... unless they have relevant prior knowledge. Details in our EMNLP paper aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-m... (with Kat Belem, Markelle Kelly, Mark Steyvers, @sameer-singh.bsky.social).

📣Announcing MLDPR 2025, an @iclr-conf.bsky.social workshop on data and benchmarking practices in ML! 🔗 mldpr2025.com 📭accepting submissions related to: ▫️data curation ▫️FAIR datasets ▫️ML data repositories ▫️reproducibility ▫️holistic benchmarking

Pictures from the recent UCI Social at @neuripsconf.bsky.social with a subset of students, faculty, guests. Looking forward to the next event at NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego!

Absolutely. I worry about an entire generation that can’t go from a blank page to a coherent, logical, articulate argument on their own. This process is not just writing: it is thinking. If we cede all our writing to AI we cede also our very ability to think.

Congratulations to newly minted PhD, Gavin Kerrigan, @gavinkerrigan.bsky.social . Not too hard to spot who Gavin is in the photo alongside his thesis committee.

If you review for a #ML conference like @iclr-conf.bsky.social or @neuripsconf.bsky.social, YOU HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO REPLY TO THE AUTHORS. If the rebuttal doesn't address your concerns explain why. But giving a score of 2-3 then ghosting the authors is super rude. I say this as an AC. #MLSky

The next generation of probabilistic machine learning for weather called GenCast is published in @natureportfolio.bsky.social today 🥳. Amazing to see the collective progress in ML for weather as a field over the last 5 years. 🏖️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Blog post link: diffusionflow.github.io/ Despite seeming similar, there is some confusion in the community about the exact connection between the two frameworks. We aim to clear up the confusion by showing how to convert one framework to another, for both training and sampling.

I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked! The lede: "Elon Musk's "fully autonomous" cars will, like other robotaxi vehicles, rely on remote human pilots." gizmodo.com/tesla-is-loo...

I wonder if the problem of running out of text to train LLMs might have been addressed in the past few weeks via the ICLR author-response process, where "War and Peace"-length responses seem to be very much in vogue.

Having never gotten around to getting an account on that other platform, this BlueSky thing seems promising so far......nice to see posts from old (and not-so-old) friends and colleagues

OpenAI's forays into education lately are not motivated by interest in education, but by opportunistic market making now it's realized students are its main users and it could get into schools too. OpenAI is not a friend to public education. It's a private predator on public education funds. 1/3