Yikes

Bingo! Do I win a prize now?

Shingles is so incredibly painful, friends. Please get your vaccine, if you are able.

Nature retracted a paper that claimed ChatGPT had a positive impact on student learning. it's not the only paper making this claim that has this problem www.404media.co/nature-retra...

Chinese researchers have created a bamboo-based plastic as strong as petroleum-based plastics, which can fully biodegrade in soil in just 2 months phys.org/news/2025-10...

Can you boost your AI review scores by asking an LLM to rewrite your paper? Yes! We call it paper laundering Our @icmlconf.bsky.social spotlight paper argues current AI reviewers aren't ready to automate peer review, and outlines what a science of peer review automation should look like 🧵👇 #ICML2026

Here are the top 5 dogs of the week!

how it started how it is going

Still at #ICLR2026 and still into RL? Come talk to @johanobandoc.bsky.social @waltermayor.bsky.social and me at our poster today (Saturday)! 🗓️April 25, 3:15 PM -5:45 PM BRT 📍Pavilion 4· #️⃣ Poster #4515

“Rahmstorf, who has studied the Amoc for 35 years, has said a collapse must be avoided ‘at all costs.’ ‘I argued this when we thought the chance of an Amoc shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%.’”

This is potentially an off-cycle hire so folks who either didn't apply this year or got unlucky in their admits are good candidates for this

Still hiring for PhD candidates who are *specifically* excited in building and deploying RL systems for self-driving vehicles and other multi-agent planning settings. Shoot me an email if you think this is you and please help spread the word!

Every politician & Ontarian should call this the Doug Effect.

RL in Big Worlds is a workshop at @rl-conference.bsky.social about ideas that enable agents to achieve goals in environments vastly more complex than themselves. This requires giving agents the ability to learn continually and use approximate value functions, models, and policies effectively.

📢 The workshop on Insights from negative results will be back at EMNLP'26! Your most-insightful failures can be submitted in 4 pages by June 25. It's also possible to commit short papers reviewed through ARR. insights-workshop.github.io/2026/cfp

Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel. King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.

🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning.. We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance. And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use! 1/

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit. You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

The first astronaut in history to speak French while en route to the moon — Canada’s very own Jeremy Hansen 🇨🇦

Richard Sutton talks about this

Share this one w your people who don’t read the news much or are passive consumers of information. A secret govt should resonate. If secret over “small” things like bike lanes - what else is there. This should resonate. It should (famous futile words).

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

Remember when world leaders -- guided by science -- agreed to work together to solve an existential threat? We do.

Took 40-odd years but Bruce has finally allowed "Born in the USA" to be used in a commercial. By the ACLU. Supporting birthright citizenship. Yeah.

He's going to scrap the sunshine list in 3...2...1 (The Sunshine list is good and should be expanded to zero)

Have you heard the story of Barkley’s good friend Lin, a Chinese immigrant scientist in Iowa? www.wbur.org/onlyagame/20...

Trainees need to learn how to identify a paper’s major takeaways and integrate them into their understanding. In her essay, @norabradford.bsky.social argues that this skill doesn’t come from outsourcing the work to large language models. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neuro-educat...

Applications for the global Google PhD Fellowship Program are open! Fellowships directly support grad students doing exceptional and innovative research in computer science and related fields as they pursue their PhD. Learn more and apply by April 30 at goo.gle/phdfellowship.

For a recent lab meeting, I wrote up a grab bag of ways to think about your development as a researcher during a PhD: emerge-lab.github.io/papers/an-un... Sharing in case folks find it useful or have feedback!

Interested in working at DAIR? We're hiring a communications lead, who we needed yesterday. Is that you? Please apply. Is that people you know? Please share the job ad with them so that they apply.

Following advice by the always-wise @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social , I am trying to get back into the habit of blogging (again) ✏️! Featuring today's post: How to pick an RL algorithm for your problem cvoelcker.de/blog/2026/ch... Please share and give feedback! #reinforcementlearning

OpenAI head of robotics just resigned over company deal with the Pentagon saying… “Surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got”

we need a system of AI ethics and governance that aligns with this very large and dependable revenue stream from the government

shit (but kinda expected)

RLC 2026 Call for Workshops is up! This is the opportunity to bring the attention of the community to the topics that you find the most important in RL!

Please don't hesitate to reach out with questions to me directly or via email to [email protected] The OpenReview submission site can be found at: openreview.net/group?id=rl-...

Workshops, held on the first day, are a primary feature of @rl-conference.bsky.social and have set a delightfully inquisitive tone. Discussions started at both workshops I've been a part of in the past persisted through the week, with some still ongoing! CfW here: rl-conference.cc/call_for_wor...

We're thrilled to share that the Call for Workshops for this year's @rl-conference.bsky.social is now live! As Workshop co-chair (alongside the wonderful Raksha Kumaraswamy and @claireve.bsky.social) we are looking forward to seeing the proposals for workshops that we receive. LINK IN NEXT POST

[1/n] Just wrapped up 7 months interning with @pcastr.bsky.social at Google DeepMind and I'm so excited to share our work: arxiv.org/abs/2602.10324. TLDR: We used LLM-powered program synthesis to automatically model and discover differences between human and LLM strategic behavior

US HHS has proposed using virtual AI doctors to address needs in rural areas

"God Bless America:" then he lists most of the countries in the hemisphere starting with Chile I think? this rules

OK "god bless america" and then naming every country in the americas from south to north is absolute king shit

You’ll never guess but the solution to people not having money is to give them money.

1,265 kWh have been burned to date on MoltBots posting on MoltBook. Might not be a huge amount in the grand scheme of things but it’s a complete waste of energy on AI agents role-playing cringy sci-fi tropes and attempting to crypto-scam each other. www.linkedin.com/posts/sashal...

Ice out

🚨 New Study 🚨 @arxiv.bsky.social has recently decided to prohibit any 'position' paper from being submitted to its CS servers. Why? Because of the "AI slop", and allegedly higher ratios of LLM-generated content in review papers, compared to non-review papers.

Target Center dunkers wear “ICE OUT” t-shirts

NEW: NeurIPS,one of the world’s top academic AI conferences, accepted research papers with 100+ AI-hallucinated citations, new report claims fortune.com/2026/01/21/n...

As someone who can't think any other way (particularly re: engagement science), I gave up on the idea that I'd be considered a "superstar" some time ago. My pubs/metrics might not look like others'; but I guarantee the students who work with me, and the community I work for, are both happier for it.