Tian and Karolina and team are at ICLR. Come say hi.

So who’s read the 2027 article? What do you think?

Someone has suggested I check out bsky again. So I'm back looking around here. Notification list is kinda boring. So any good conversations going on? Perhaps about LLM/AI reasoning?

Anyone else have the worry that a lot of LLM research is .... just bad psychology?

Okay, so just a few* thoughts (*this got longer as I wrote 😅….long thread)-

I got to ski Revelstoke this winter break. Couple observations: the price of receiving 600 cm of snow by Jan 8 is that it is constantly snowing. Saw almost no sun the whole time and the peak was often in whiteout conditions (though North Bowl was always clear…). See image for more.

Multiple friends have likely lost their homes in Los Angeles. Can’t imagine how disorienting this would be. They had only minutes to flee and grab belongings.

OK. Practical question times. How are you adjusting your research given progress in reasoning style models? Also how are you adjusting the way you work?

Pretraining is not done. It's just that theorists haven't told the hackers how to do it better.

Now that I've had a taste of X without post length limitations, I've got to say that it is quite annoying have to fit tweets into 256 characters here on bsky. On X, when they get to long, they go below the fold, and so you're still incentivized to make it short. Can't we have that here?

I've now read this paper carefully if anyone wants to discuss it.

I've never understood people who block people on Twitter, outside of cases of harassment. Such weak sauce.

Has anyone out there compared the GPU/memory specs for the new Macbook Pro M4 Pro/Max computers to the requirements to run inference in the more interesting open source LLM models, especially those aimed at reasoning? [1/2]

Has anyone read the new Shalev-Shwartz paper on PAC reasoning yet and want to discuss?

*AI for Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science*, a workshop hosted jointly by the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute, will be held in Berkeley at April 7-11, 2025. simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/si...

Huge community response to this. Much appreciated.

My 9 yo has finished all the Harry Potters. Any suggestion on where to go from here? Maybe age appropriate sci fi?

Poem by Joseph Fasano

Congrats to Antonio Lijoi on being elected President of the International Society of Bayesian Analysis!

NeurIPS Test of Time Awards: Generative Adversarial Nets Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le

As the semester is coming to an end, I've been able to steal some time to do research on my own. Such a buzz.

School’s out for summer. School’s out for ever!

“Next week we will derive [something awesome],” bragged Prof Roy. “This is our last class, Professor!”, said the brave student.

Late Sunday music.

Waterloo is facing a 75 million CAD deficit and so they are implementing a hiring freeze. As one of the world’s top universities, it is ridiculous that Ontario is not funding it fully. It has generated so much SV wealth, I suggest a SV billionaire solve this deficit and then some.

Hot take: Working another weekend this semester, I am left wondering: Why does the #NLProc publication process have so much artificial urgency baked into it? Requiring responses within 24h, emergency reviewers, everything urgent. Like, why? Slow science can also be a community goal.

Has anyone asked whether scaling laws are surprising or not? (Not only to meat puppets, but surprising in the real sense of "it could have been different".) Universal learning rates look like scaling laws in the non-extreme case, where the class isn't trivial or impossible. No compute there though.

Peter Loeb has passed away. Loeb made fundamental contributions to potential theory as well as the application of nonstandard models to mathematical analysis. [1/3] www.legacy.com/us/obituarie...

Hey... anyone know w.t.f. runs BlueSky? Does this sit on top of mastodon? Can we edit the software? How do we tweak our feeds? E.g., if I'm in the mood for ML or for politics or whatever?

Reviewing is dead. I just read some ICLR reviews. Absolutely junk. No insight. Written by humans, but could have been written by a chatbot or teenager who had read a few dozen reviews. Why do we think this is useful? Only 5% (if that!) of the community has worthwhile opinions.

Demis talks about AlphaGo choosing the optimal on a board with 10^170 positions but we already know that AlphaGo was very suboptimal. Which raises the question of how we might ever know how good AlphaGo is in any absolute sense.

By demand, I've created the final starter pack in my ML Personality Starter Pack Series. I'm uncertain who belongs in this starter pack and so if you think you better fit in the Grumpy ML or Unreasonably Upbeat ML starter packs, let me know. (Self) nominations welcome go.bsky.app/5Suyk58

For those who don’t feel like they fit into my Grumpy Machine Learners list (which I still need to update based on 100+ requests) I’ve created another starter pack: go.bsky.app/Js7ka12 (Self) nominations welcome.

This is exactly what I need. Thank you so much.🙏

These seem like some very common (statistical) sense recommendations for eval. Still the title of the paper is somewhat confusing as if these ideas are new. I would’ve suggested “Bringing a statistical approach…” www.anthropic.com/research/sta...

Any lighting nerds out there? I'm curious about the possibility of replacing (some of) my kitchen--dining room lights with (something like) "full spectrum" lights to fight lack of sun / winter blues. I have a lightbox from back in my days in Boston. Looking to exploit physiological effects.

I'm surprised this result (which is essentially a nonuniform version realizable, online classification) was not known. Result says you can make a finite number of mistakes if and only if the class is a countable union of classes with finite Littlestone dimension. arxiv.org/abs/2312.00170

Curious what people think about DeepSeek. Also.... who is DeepSeek? From website, seems to be a Chinese company but almost zero details otherwise.

DARPA STORM. Who's going to this meeting? Need to decide whether to go. Anyone want to talk about it?

Just realized that there are no polls on bsky. We need polls and please allow them to have factorial design.

Stay up to date with machine learners whose name contains an S. go.bsky.app/cMAq64

Some machine learners were once children. Here’s where you can find them: go.bsky.app/F6mM37U

Curious to learn what research is looking like at Meta these days. Seems that most other places are shutting down research. I’d like to think that this means we will be stagnate once LLMs hit any nontrivial wall. Thoughts welcome on this too.

stop importing your old tweets! they sucked the first time too!

I made a starter pack for Bayesian ML and stats (mostly to see how this starter pack business works). Let me know whom I missed! go.bsky.app/2Bqtn6T

I've created an initial Grumpy Machine Learners starter park. If you think you're grumpy and you "do machine learning", nominate yourself. If you're on the list, but don't think you are grumpy, then take a look in the mirror. go.bsky.app/6ddpivr

Starter packs are nice, but I don't like how they are owned by a single account.

Does anyone have insight into the nature of scaling failing? Do we have an S curve or is driving NLL to zero not actually yielding new gains?

Who do I pay to get longer posts and have my posts prioritized over everyone else’s?

50k to 1.3k followers. LFG! Just back from Dagstuhl workshop on the future of Bayesian methodology in deep learning. Turns out the best optimizers are approximate variational Bayes already so even in this narrow sense the future is already Bayesian. The foundations aren’t subjective Bayesian though