After countless yrs at Google DeepMind, I've decided to join [company]. Impossible decision. Grateful to @jeffdean.bsky.social & @demishassabis.bsky.social for the mentorship & late-night scientific ruminations. GDM taught me how to eat, breathe & think. Special place. Excited for their next moves 🚀

💡Can we trust synthetic data for statistical inference? We show that synthetic data (e.g., LLM simulations) can significantly improve the performance of inference tasks. The key intuition lies in the interactions between the moment residuals of synthetic data and those of real data

We’ll know he’s really made it when Alcatraz gets autocorrected to Alcaraz.

Small idiosyncratic language errors in otherwise clear technical papers are now a plus; assurance that I'm not wasting my time trying to read GPT spam. #neurips2025

Spent the whole day reading unlearning papers. If any of the methods worked, I might hope to recover from the experience.

Final 5m of NBA games solved. If you foul: • opposing team gets 1 FT • & keeps possession w fresh 24 Next up, Israel/Palestine.

Google miles behind Open/Anth til overnight boom 2.5. Mosaic models underwrite $1B until boom mothballed. Deepseek turns world upside down, but only for 5min. The speed at which the winds turn here is truly wild.

What problem were airplane designers hoping to solve when they proposed this monstrosity?

50M human hours have been spent adjusting airplane seats into upright position before takeoff, saving a grand total of 0 human lives

Unlike OpenAI, ostensibly controlled by a powerful holding entity, here have effectively 0 board power. This saga's shaping up like the Asimov's Spacer novels, but instead of each book exploring a different ratio of humans to robotic servants, it's a different level of corporate oversight.

OpenAI folks getting creative about corporate governance. I've seen this movie before... www.theinformation.com/articles/thi...

On my way to Singapore for #iclr2025. Excited to pop my head out of AI product development to get inspired, connect w the next generation of researchers, and also for food. hmu

Controversial opinion. It’s impossible to lease an EV in the US that’s even half as good a deal as @Tesla model 3/Y.

Plugin that automatically clicks thru "reject" to select "only strictly necessary" on the cookie pop-ups. 💵

CTO’s the most slippery title in the world. Depending on the company, you’re either 1. A technical founder who never wanted to manage, now an IC engineer 2. A VP of Engineering 3. Leading all of EPD (+AI) 4. An influencer with no internal responsibilities

Just as the jaws of tetragenarianism are closing in, stole this W from the jaws of impending awardless decrepitude.

Phase 1 of my research career: "ML" = rebranding of the successful subset of AI. Phase 2: "AI" = rebranding of the successful subset of ML. Phase 3: AI & ML truly starting to diverge.

Can't find any person or AI that can explain Luka → Lakers. Only satisfying theory I can conjure: behind-the-scenes feud → "calf strain" masking a relationship strain → trade demand. But according to ChatGPT's research, Luka was blindsided by the trade.

Just another boring week in the AI capabilities landscape.

How to **efficiently** build personalized language models **without** textual info on user preferences? Our Personalized-RLHF work: - light-weight user model - personalize all *PO alignment algorithms - strong performance on the largest personalized preference dataset arxiv.org/abs/2402.05133

First #runconference @neuripsconf.bsky.social #NeurIPS2024 was great! Will share tomorrow's deets later today, join us! @zacharylipton.bsky.social @adamjelley.bsky.social @random-steve.bsky.social

caught red-handed

Excited to attend #NeurIPS this year. AI research has never been more impactful and yet its core identity, key initiatives, and trajectory have never been less clear. Looking forward to meeting a new generation of talent, to having wild conversations, & to reconnecting w old friends.

Thirded

Meta-comment. Nested quote-{dunks, replies} are a navigation nightmare. One arrives at the last reply and must read the thread per reverse chronology, clicking through each tweet in sequence to get to the origin. Would love a navigation tool that jumps to the origin, progressively zooms out.

The parallels b/w the long COVID & chronic Lyme stories (along dimensions of symptoms, narrative, & scientific controversy (over residual inflammatory syndrome vs psychology vs persistent infection)) only deepen: www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

This morning Uber Business Comfort was cheaper than UberX. Now questioning everything I thought I knew about Uber’s pricing model & constrained optimization. Is no inequality sacred? Is math real? Are corporations not only heartless but irrational? Checking into psych ward. Send thoughts & prayers.

What BlueSky got right that Mastodon got wrong. For the 99% of users that don’t give a FF about federation, it works exactly like old Twitter, and they never need to know. Classic Apple-epitomized design principle: Advanced features should be easy to access but, when unwanted, disappear entirely.

What a surprise (not!). Yet again ... poor evaluations of specialized medical LLMs result in overhyped claims relative to the base LLMs. #bioMLeval

Medically adapted foundation models (think Med-*) turn out to be more hot air than hot stuff. Correcting for fatal flaws in evaluation, the current crop are no better on balance than generic foundation models, even on the very tasks for which benefits are claimed. arxiv.org/abs/2411.04118

Puzzled by wildly weird ASR errors on iPhones (presumably a light on-device model). Today’s greatest: “dBrief”

Too soon to declare social media wars for old ML twitter are over and BS won?

I’d love to write a blog post ruminating on all the ways the “running a startup is just like running an academic lab” trope is wildly false, and also the ways it’s kinda true…

Moral of the story: nobody ever wanted “Twitter but X” for any X ≠ “2018”.

Who could have suspected fraud in b-school psychology? Utterly flabbergasted. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Took a beat but wow.

This feels promising.