1/2 We've heard of the curse of dimensionality. But what about the curse of multilinguality? "If you try to pack more languages into the same size model, they are each going to degrade," said @shaynelongpre.bsky.social of @mit.edu at the Simons Institute.

1/5 Empirical conclusions depend on data and on human decisions made during the research process. @zstevenwu.bsky.social (@cmu.edu) spoke at the Simons Institute of using agents with unique personas to induce diversity in AI decision making, the baseline being the "Standard Persona."

1/4 Remember Sydney, the chatbot that urged a @nytimes.com columnist to break up with his wife? Or how an LLM fine-tuned to output insecure code became misaligned on tasks unrelated to coding? What do these have in common? — Roger Grosse of @anthropic.com and U of Toronto at the Simons Institute.

Inioluwa Deborah Raji kicks off the workshop on Governance at the Technological Frontier: Translating Research into Policy for AI Oversight. simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/go... #SimonsLive

Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/go...

1/4 Matus Telgarsky of @newyorkuniversity.bsky.social's Courant Institute on Peter Bartlett’s unique contributions to theoretical ML through the 1990s: “For people like me, who came [into the field] in the 2000s, [his papers were] like a shining light.”

Join us for a special workshop on Governance at the Technological Frontier: Translating Research into Policy for AI Oversight. Keynotes by California State Senator Jerry McNerney and Suresh Venkatasubramanian. Thursday, 4/30, 1–5:30 p.m. Registration required. simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/go...

1/3 In 1958, the NY Times wrote about Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron, as an "embryo of computer designed to read and grow wiser." @ucsandiego.bsky.social's Misha Belkin examined this astonishing claim and came to a surprising conclusion, at a Simons Institute workshop honoring Peter Bartlett's work

"Can AI assist in Mathematics and Computer Science research?" Berkeley EECS Colloquium Prabhakar Raghavan, Chief Technologist, Google 4 – 5 p.m., Wed., April 15 Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall eecs.berkeley.edu/research/col...

Next week at the Simons Institute, a workshop on Agency in Collaborative Learning. Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/ag...

Congratulations to our friend and colleague @matei-zaharia.bsky.social on being awarded the ACM Prize in Computing!

Thursday and Friday this week, a workshop on Theoretical Foundations: From the Early Days of Neural Networks to the Modern Deep Learning Era, celebrating Peter Bartlett's 60th birthday. simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/th...

We're thrilled that our short doc, "Until the Sun Engulfs the Earth: Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity," is featured in mathēmatiká, the April issue of Labocine. www.labocine.com

The call for Winter Vacation Research Internships (VRI) in CS at #USyd is out! Open to students (undergrads and postgrads) currently enrolled in an 🇦🇺 uni. Have a look! Apply by April 19. www.sydney.edu.au/engineering/... (Want to work with me? Check out CS2026/9, CS2026/10, CS2026/38, CS2026/39)

In this episode of The New Quantum Era podcast, Simons Institute Quantum Pod postdoc Dominik Hangleiter maps the path toward verifiable quantum advantage. www.newquantumera.com/podcast/quan...

Theoretical Foundations: From the Early Days of Neural Networks to the Modern Deep Learning Era Thursday, Apr. 9 – Friday, Apr. 10 Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/th...

Great series of blog posts on quantum advantage by Dominik Hangleiter, one of the postdocs in our Quantum Research Pod. quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/06/h... #simonsquantum

Next week at the Simons Institute, a workshop on Trust in Decentralized Systems. Register to attend in person or view the livestream. Hope to see you there! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/tr...

1/4 Foundation Models: "We don't really know what we should expect [the phrase] to mean...and this causes real challenges," said Matthew McDermott of @columbiauniversity.bsky.social, at the Simons Institute workshop on Theory of Computing and Healthcare. We need a formal definition, he said.

From our friends at Berkeley Math. math.berkeley.edu/about/events...

1/2 Ken Rothman of @bostonu.bsky.social began his Distinguished Lecture at the Simons Institute on "Epidemiology is Easy – Anyone Can Do It" with a caveat: “Anyone can attempt to do it but doesn’t always work out that well.” He spoke at the workshop on Theory of Computing and Healthcare.

1/2 "There is sort of an obligation on the part of somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about privacy to open with the bad news," said Katrina Ligett of HUJI, talking about Research on Sensitive Data at the Simons Institute workshop on Theory of Computing and Healthcare.

Join us at 3:30 p.m. PT. Register to attend or access the livestream. simons.berkeley.edu/events/respo...

1/3 Will increasing compute and training data continue to improve performance of foundation models? Maybe. "I’m interested in asking: if it’s not the case, then why?" said Sewon Min of @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social at the Simons Institute workshop on Federated and Collaborative Learning Boot Camp

#FlashbackFriday www.youtube.com/watch?v=soQR...

#FlashbackFriday ls.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berk...

#1stproof news.columbia.edu/news/could-a...

Next was a great talk by @r-jy.bsky.social and Greg Demirchyan on alignment problems in AI governance at @simonsinstitute.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV2P... (5/7)

Congratulations to our colleague John Wright, who has received a 2026 Sloan Fellowship! chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/seven-u...

1/4 Where can data leakage happen in a machine learning pipeline? "Leaks can happen at any point in the pipeline, said Om Thakkar of OpenAI, at the Simons Institute workshop on Federated and Collaborative Learning Boot Camp. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/om-tha...

Inspired by Turing's "Computing machinery and intelligence," Emily Riehl proposes a series of tests to help identify whether a generative AI system can meaningfully contribute to the process of doing mathematics. youtube.com/live/svF-1ek...

Join us February 24 for the second and final Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture of the semester. Registration is required. simons.berkeley.edu/events/respo...

1/3 If we get to AGI in 5 years, will we need federated learning, i.e. decentralized ML for training models over multiple nodes that each have private data? Q posed at the Simons Institute workshop on Federated and Collaborative Learning Boot Camp. Video simons.berkeley.edu/talks/cheste...

More on #1stproof, from @sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/math....

If you've been feeling that what's missing from the discussion of AI is a bit of Plato, check out @benbenbrubaker.bsky.social on the @quantamagazine.bsky.social podcast (from last month). www.quantamagazine.org/distinct-ai-...

From @nytimespr.bsky.social, a closer look at #1stproof, a community experiment to see how well AI can do research math. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/s...

news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/02/when-you-do-the-math-humans-still-rule/ #1stproof

In the latest installment of Theory at the Institute and Beyond, Senior Scientist Nikhil Srivastava explores innovative approaches to workshop design, and introduces a community experiment to see how well AI can do research math. simons.berkeley.edu/news/theory-... #1stproof

Next week at the Simons Institute, a workshop on Theory of Computing and Healthcare. Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/th...

Join us Thursday! simons.berkeley.edu/events/align...

Just how big are today's LLM pre-training data centers? It'd have taken 5.5 years to train Grok3 on El Capitan, the world's fastest supercomputer, said Keith Rush of Google DeepMind at the Simons Institute workshop on Federated and Collaborative Learning Boot Camp simons.berkeley.edu/talks/keith-...

Thurs., 2/5 at 3:30 p.m., Law & Society Fellows Rui-Jie Yew and Greg Demirchyan discuss Alignment Problems in AI Governance. simons.berkeley.edu/events/align...

Join us today at 3:30. Registration is required. simons.berkeley.edu/events/lets-...

1/2 "The most striking finding we had is that the students that practiced math problems with ChatGPT without any guardrails did 17% worse on immediate subsequent exam where they did not have AI assistance." Hamsa Bastani of @upenn.edu at the Simons Institute. simons.berkeley.edu/talks/hamsa-...

1/2 Given two randomized control trials, RCT1 (100 participants) & RCT2 (1000), intuition says that RCT2 gives the better estimate of treatment effect. But sometimes our intuition is wrong, said Hannah Li of @columbiauniversity.bsky.social at the Simons Institute. simons.berkeley.edu/talks/hannah...

Join us next week for the Federated and Collaborative Learning Boot Camp. Register to attend in person or access the livestream. simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/fe...

Register to attend or access the livestream for Katrina Ligett's Karp Lecture on 1/29: simons.berkeley.edu/events/lets-...

In this Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture in the Complexity and Linear Algebra program, Virginia Vassilevska Williams examines progress on matrix multiplication algorithms over the decades and offers some intuition about where the research area may be headed. simons.berkeley.edu/news/matrix-...

The successes of generative AI and LLMs involve deep internal representations of the world. In his Theoretically Speaking lecture, Jon Kleinberg explored how these work, and how they relate to the representations of the world that we build as humans. bit.ly/4qE98dO

Our workshop on LLMs, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Neuroscience explored why LLM capabilities in logic and reasoning lag behind their linguistic capacity, and how a different model — the human brain — could point the way forward. bit.ly/45QWwaM