NU London Philosopher David Freeborn (@dpwf0.bsky.social) presents work by the Computational Philosophy Lab at the Ethics and AI conference at Warsaw University of Technology. Read more about the lab's work here: cpl.sites.northeastern.edu

The first talk in this series is next week (Wednesday 1st October), featuring David Freeborn @dpwf0.bsky.social from NU London and Gillian Magee from AstraZeneca, speaking about AI Ethics in Action: Mapping Responsible AI. Register below to attend in person or online!

We're pleased to announce an exciting new lecture series in October, in collaboration with FDM. They feature an academic from NU London's Computational Philosophy Lab, paired up with industry specialists. Sign up to attend in person (near London Bridge) or online. www.fdmgroup.com/understandin...

Don't miss NU London philosophers Christoph Schuringa @schuringa.bsky.social and Naomi Goulder at How the Light Gets In festival this weekend at Kenwood House. They are both on a panel with Timothy Williamson and @nigelwarburton.bsky.social, on Sunday 21st. howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/lo...

one of the wildest bits of discourse, is the idea that we can just ban ai we cannot ban ai. code is speech and you can run these models on a 4080. there's no putting this genie back in the bottle.

More coverage of NU London philosopher Christoph Schuringa's recent book. Read below!

Now officially published here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

It's quite funny that fairly early in its history philosophy invented writing well (Plato) and reasoning well (Aristotle) and made it clear you can only do one; subsequently clarifying that we'll typically do neither.

TIL the original paper describing CRISPR, by Francisco Mojica, was rejected by 4 journals and took 2 years to be published

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

My new paper has been accepted at Synthese! I tackle an ongoing problem with the learning of compositional communication in conventional signaing games. I build two new models to show that structured receivers can learn and retain compositional information. philpapers.org/rec/FRECUI-2

The distribution of the Red-billed chough is absolutely bizarre.

Sometimes I look at my bibliographies and think... I bet these papers have never been cited together before.

STAGGERING: This new study of 133 countries is the first to estimate the impact of all USAID’s work. In 2 decades, it has saved *92M* lives. Current cuts, if not reversed, are forecast to cost up to *14M* lives thru 2030. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

In our latest paper, we discovered a surprising result: training LLMs with self-play reinforcement learning on zero-sum games (like poker) significantly improves performance on math and reasoning benchmarks, zero-shot. Whaaat? How does this work?

Check out this fascinating and detailed interview with NU London's Christoph Schuringa @schuringa.bsky.social, speaking about his new book A Social History of Analytic Philosophy! www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_iu...

Excited to be at Ford's innovation space in the Stratford Olympic Park, for a Conversations On AI event on how we can use AI to innovate for human benefit. The panel features NU London Philosophy's own Hossein Dabbagh, and the event series is organised by alumni from our MA Philosophy and AI

The games business is about games. If you’re in the games business, and somehow (as often happens) your company somehow is now focused on something else (AI, XR, “IP,” acquisitions, etc.) you’re in for a period of struggle. Everyone will wonder what’s wrong. But you know. It’s about games. Gameplay.

Anthropic has scored a major victory in an ongoing legal battle over AI models and copyright, with big implications for the many AI lawsuits winding through the US legal system. By @knibbs.bsky.social: www.wired.com/story/anthro...

There's no way scientists are only just now learning about grad school

I decided to become a journalist aged fifteen after reading ‘1984’ and being appalled at the thought that governments could rewrite history. Orwell knew the USSR did it. Now China pretends the Tiananmen massacre didn’t happen. It did. I was there, and saw it for myself.

Four charts showing the extent of cuts to NASA in the FY26 budget: - Cuts to every science division - Smallest science funding since 1984 - 19 active, inflight missions cancelled - Smallest NASA budget since FY 1961

Delighted to be at the launch of the The Computational Philosophy Lab at Northeastern University London. Brian Ball is giving the welcome talk. Later we will hear from @alicehelliwell.bsky.social @dpwf0.bsky.social, @tessbuckley.bsky.social amongst others. Learn more here: cpl.sites.northeastern.edu

Huge News: The Computational Philosophy Lab (CPL) is launching tomorrow at 10:00! The CPL will be the UK's first and premier centre dedicated to computationally-enabled & AI-enhanced philosophy. Location: Devon House 58 Saint Katharine's Way, London, E1W 1LP www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-comput...

It would be hard to overstate the ongoing costs of the public sector's use of Big IT vendors. Stunning that it's still ongoing, 15 years after GDS started the fight to escape. I'm thinking, e.g. major systems provided by CGI, Accenture, et al, that are 20+ years behind today's digital services. 1/n

This is a view from the surface of Comet 67P. The busy particles in the foreground are cosmic rays or bits of dust and ice. The dots moving in the background are stars.

Well worth reading to get a sense of the scale of the cuts to public science funding in the US. It might take decades to recover from this damage. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This is absolutely terrible news. With the shifting regulatory climate (i.e., antivax ratfuckery), Moderna has withdrawn their application for their eagerly anticipated COVID-flu combo vaccine. This vaccine offered better protection than getting each shot separately. h/t @merz.bsky.social

Clearly I have more influence than I thought! xAI claim they will now publish Grok's system prompts openly on GitHub.

Join us for the launch of the Computational Philosophy Lab, the UK's first and premier centre dedicated to computationally-enabled and AI-enhanced philosophy. Date: May 30 • 10:00 am Location: Devon House 58 Saint Katharine's Way, London, E1W 1LP www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-comput...

Grok is an extreme example, but in general the lack of transparency means we don't know what biases major LLMs are picking up implicitly, or probably in this case being explicitly given. I think there's a good case for making system prompts public (whilst keeping model weights private).

If you wish to train a large language model from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

They’re here 🎉 @versobooks.bsky.social

My paper 'The philosopher versus the physicist: Eddington's rejoinder' has just been published with the BJHP (@thebshp.bsky.social): www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Wow. It must be nice to be able to get paid to write error-filled polemics in turgid prose on topics you're almost entirely ignorant about. I don't think there's a claim in this that isn't false. Endlessly tossing-off lazy culture war screeds is a cushy way to make a living.

"o3 I want you to make a map of the lighthouses of the great lakes. I want the map in “dark mode “ but each lighthouse marker should be aesthetically sized so it covers the distance it can be seen on an average night and is the color of the light" A few rounds of feedback later...

Hong Kong falls to 140th in press freedom index with historic low score, entering ‘red zone’ for first time – HKFP: ‘“At RSF, we have never seen such a sharp and rapid deterioration in the press freedom record of any country or territory,”’

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's chatbots will supplement your real friends: "The average American has fewer than 3 friends ... but has demand for ... 15 friends" (h/t x.com/romanhelmetg...)

I wrote about the connection between two big recent stories in AI: the sudden increase in sycophancy from ChatGPT and the growing evidence that AIs can be hyper persuasive. First we shape our tools, then they shape us. www.oneusefulthing.org/p/personalit...

Our canceled grant was one of many among these.

Our very own Brian Ball is giving his inaugural professorial lecture at NU London on May 8th, 6-7:30pm UK time. Join us in person or online - registration here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-mind-...

Transparency in AI is dying with these "announcements": no evals, no blog, just vibes. It's fine for their product users, but not API users. Go ahead and kill the API and lean in sama ;)

An anecdote in @whippletom.bsky.social's great book 'Battle of the Beams' made me realise I was looking at a puzzle I knew well from my proof.kucharski.io research, but in a new disguise. The story begins in 1941, with a growing network of Nazi radar stations across Europe... 1/

Really not sure what to make of GPT4o's current personality. Sometimes it can get a bit too enthusiastic...

Mis/disinformation research officially cancelled. Understanding the creation, content, distribution, and susceptibility is one of today’s key scientific and societal challenges. Researching this is not free speech infringement. Such a claim is intentionally misleading. www.nsf.gov/updates-on-p...

Trying to untangle the claims here and it sounds like the idea is that some overzealous Trumper accidentally sent Harvard the internal list of the escalating demands they had planned to hit Harvard with later on, after Harvard had agreed to milder or vaguer demands? www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/b...

I try to avoid reading things about LLMs and AI unless I know that they are going to be good. This paper by @fintanmallory.com "Large Language models are stochastic measuring devices" is going to be good philpapers.org/archive/MALL...

Taps the clip… youtu.be/PDBiLT3LASk?...