Mathematical breakthrough of the year: Financial Times finally calculating the normalizing constant of the uniform distribution over ALL outcomes.

I’m very bad at getting things done but pretty good at making things happen. 🤷🏽‍♂️ How does this work?

My favourite vegan cream substitute is pasta water. Not only does it work better for pasta sauces, it reduces risk of death by assassination after your Italian friends learn that you put cream in carbonara…

Thinking Machines co-founder Andrew Tulloch reported/rumoured to receive £3.5bn pay package over 5 years to rejoin Meta. To put this into perspective, this would approximately cover Armenia's entire education budget (over the next 5 years). Not accounting for income/capital gains taxes of course.

Just realised how hopeless and inadequate it feels when - accidentally - I google for information instead of asking ChatGPT (equivalent). Context: I was looking for a bedtime reading book that is complex, for preteens but structured as a collection of stand-alone episodes rather than one long novel

Is Pope Leo giving the NeurIPS keynote this year?

When I applied to PhDs, I could derive the E-M algo after 5 yrs of uni and I felt I stood out. Many applicants didn’t do much ML before. This year, Miranda, barely out of high school starts her undergraduate with a NeurIPS spotlight, two AI olympiad medals, having bern to EEML 2x plus AI retreat 😨

I like the sound of this common EU corporate entity idea! Except quite clearly the virtual state shouldn’t be called “regime 28” but “regime 0” or failing that, “regime -1”. Open for consultation until 30 Sept so take a look! www.eu-inc.org

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, like a turd that wouldn’t flush, I re-emerge again in the geriatric Millennial basketball scene. Wish me good health.

Mom, can we watch Star Wars? Mom: We have Star Wars at home Star wars at home:

We will have GPT6 before GTA6

I wrote an op-ed on the world-class STEM research ecosystem in the United States, and how this ecosystem is now under attack on multiple fronts by the current administration: newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-awar...

OpenAI automated HR assistant

Arrived in Sarajevo for @eemlcommunity.bsky.social Located in a narrow valley, it’s an ideal setting to get the momentum going in my deep learning talk later. I’m keen to explore beyond the hotel coffee though which, one assumes, is carefully curated to highlight floral notes of a morning cigarette

So you want to skip our thinning proofs—but you’d still like our out-of-the-box attention speedups? I’ll be presenting the Thinformer at two ICML workshop posters tomorrow! Catch me at Es-FoMo (1-2:30, East hall A) and at LCFM (10:45-11:30 & 3:30-4:30, West 202-204)

BREAKING: OpenAI point guard Jason Wei joins Meta in shocking trade news. OpenAI receives two ConvNet researchers and a 2027 first-round draft pick. Veteran Yann LeCun rumored to be missing another season due to slow Achilles recovery. Apple “cautiously optimistic” about G-league chances.

Your data is low-rank, so stop wasting compute! In our new paper on low-rank thinning, we share one weird trick to speed up Transformer inference, SGD training, and hypothesis testing at scale. Come by ICML poster W-1012 Tuesday at 4:30!

Low-Rank Thinning is presented tomorrow at ICML ⏰ Tue 15 Jul 4:30 - 7 p.m. PDT icml.cc/virtual/2025...

Off to ICML next week? Check out my student Annabelle’s paper in collaboration with @lestermackey.bsky.social and colleagues on low-rank thinning! New theory, dataset compression, efficient attention and more: arxiv.org/abs/2502.12063

They solved the alignment problem

There once was a good man called Frederik He landed a sweet job in Limerick For fifty-six grand He would teach on command "Entschuldigung", "Tschüss" and "Ich liebe dich"

Been awesome to meet @number10cat.bsky.social earlier today! My hero, the only constant among all the turmoil. Having served under 6 prime ministers, Olympics, Brexit. Loyal to no one, doesn’t give a fur ball about anything: the perfect role model for gen Z.

Rich get richer The three emerging hubs for frontier AI jobs and wealth creation in Europe -- London - Zürich - Paris -- have already been the wealthiest cities in Europe by per capita GDP, wages and wealth. Are there examples of newfound wealth creation by AI anywhere? Maybe UiPath in Bucharest?

Weymo is an interesting experience. Because there's no driver, every ride feels like it's the driver. Feels a bit like a loyal pet, because it's obviously not a person but has agency and your attribute some level of personality to it. A bit sad to let them go when a ride is over.

Are you in your 30s and being offered more than the entire f*ing LA Lakers for superintelligence research? Take my advice: Get a notebook and write down all the hyperparameters and random details you still remember. Your memory wont be getting any better as you age.

Easy.

9% chance of catgirl dystopia

Excited to announce that my new LLM startup has reached professor level intelligence! Try it by sending an email to the address you find on a website from the 90s. Most of the time, there is no answer. After multiple nudges you may get a reply saying your question is obvious citing its past work.

Meaningful conversations with Gemini Pro, volume 13

A formal methods (LEAN) companion to Analysis I book by Terrence Tao. Looks very cool. terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/05/31/a...

Teachers are about 1% of developed countries' population. No matter how good AI gets, I firmly believe the need for teachers remains (modulo demographic decline) And it's not like you can speed the job up a lot. Teachers won't get 2-day workweeks unless we radically increase teacher-pupil ratio.

A new blog post with intuitions behind continuous-time Markov chains, a building block of diffusion language models, like @inceptionlabs.bsky.social's Mercury and Gemini Diffusion. This post touches on different ways of looking at Markov chains, connections to point processes, and more.

Oh dear. That's a lot of posts.

Important health and safety warning issued in the UK: Due to unprecedented sunny weather in April, strawberries are expected to grow to sizes not seen since the 2000s, causing choking hazard if one tries to eat them in one bite. If climate change is going to kill us this is the way I want to go…

I am looking for investors in my new side gig start-up: Our product is determining whether a frontier AI lab will build AGI using finite VC money. We will need lots of funding.

BREAKING: Newly elected mathematician-turned-president declares Romania a Banach space.

Trivia nugget about the new Romanian president: not only has he competed in the international math olympiad (IMO), he came absolute first twice with perfect 42/42 marks. A feat achieved by only about 30 students ever.

"You need to get hold of NVIDIA’s chips, stick them in the datacenter somewhere, and ask them nicely to multiply matrices until the sand starts to think." very nice line by @harrylaw.bsky.social sifted.eu/articles/goo...

The NBA is really pushing this diversity and inclusion thing. Whether you’re a slightly chubby sarcastic white guy from the Balkans or a middle aged man whose body is starting to malfunction, NBA has a range of role models you can identify with in this year’s playoffs.

is that a picture of… pickle cell disease?

In another shock announcement, the LA Lakers traded Luka Doncic to the Vatican. Lakers General Manager Rob Pelinka declined to comment, but Tweeted "Offence sells Tickets. Defence wins Conclaves".

I don’t understand the “OpenAI won’t convert to for-profit, it will convert to PBC instead” news given that the definition I found of PBC is that it’s a type of for-profit with some vacuous “but with a good purpose” clause. 🤷🏽

I've started mostly using Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental) but I'm seeing failure modes that I assumed have been ironed out years ago: when asking it to reformat some text as a table, at some point it switches topic entirely. Here, it starts talking about a 1611 document from the Archives of Manila?

Left: Forward Deployed Engineer, Right: Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

As if we didn’t have enough geopolitical tension. Biscuit boss is toying with world war three. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Behold the 'EU consortium' action plan for catching up on AI. Step 1: create beurocratic overhead before any work is done. Step 2: involve at least 5-10 mediocre sites pre-diluting talent density before any talent is present in any meaningful concentration. Step 3: Write a bunch of reports.

Looks like investors are rushing to safe assets like gold and eggs.

I'm a superforecaster, ask me anything.

nan