Ben Recht
@beenwrekt.bsky.social
Blog: https://argmin.substack.com/ Webpage: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/ The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us. (Princeton) https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691272443/the-irrational-decision
What ought to be fair game and fair use for open corpus public intelligence? As always, it's complicated.
Open and Shut
What should be fair game and fair use for open corpus public intelligence?
argmin.net
Now that the entire tech industry is on board, here’s a call to build AI models not just with open weights but with an open corpus.
Public Intelligence
A call for AI models with open weights, open source, and open corpus.
argmin.net
I don't understand how people can report on companies complaining about distillation and IP theft without mentioning these companies' entire tech stack depends on distillation and IP theft. It's an important detail!
Silicon Valley Splits Over Closing the Borders to Chinese A.I. (Gift Article)
Anthropic and OpenAI are clashing with the rest of the tech industry over whether “open-source” models from China should be freely available or restricted.
nytimes.com
Adding fuel to the fire, here's a post I wrote about open corpus models last July. It's all still true. www.argmin.net/p/an-open-mi...
An open mindset
The commitments required for fully open source machine learning
argmin.net
Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · 2w agoNow that the rich and powerful people are calling for open-weights models, it's time to pressure them to be legitimately brave and back open-corpus models.
Now that the rich and powerful people are calling for open-weights models, it's time to pressure them to be legitimately brave and back open-corpus models.
Marco Z@ocramz.bsky.social · 2w agojensen one of us, let's bring him over on bsky xcancel.com/i/status/208...
Why are there no science-based guitar lessons? Where are my RCTs of pentatonic licks vs harmonic minor sweeps?
Science-based Shredding
Why don’t people tout RCTs of piano lessons?
argmin.net
In an essay for Zócalo Public Square, I wrote about the history and politics of optimaxxing diets.
Read This Before You Start Proteinmaxxing | Essay
A Computer Scientist on Why Optimization Culture Is Destined to Fail
zocalopublicsquare.org
I will admit that I had never heard of the Jacobian Conjecture until yesterday, but I am also surprised anyone thought it was true. Local invertibility of a Jacobian doesn't imply invertibility for differentiable functions. Why should it for polynomials? Math is too weird.
Dean Ball: Open source software is communist and threatens to bring on a dystopian hellscape. Also, it's COVID.
mr. TIM@timkellogg.me · 3w agoAI Communism commenting on K3, Dean Ball, head of public policy at OpenAI, describes some of why China may be firmly backing open models x.com/deanwball/st...
What does it mean for exercise to be “science-based?”
Methods to Madness
Reading Greg Nuckols and thinking about what it means to get stronger by science.
argmin.net
Thinking through why myopic evidence-based medicine can't see whether physical therapy works.
Never Ending Math Equation
Myopic evidence-based medicine can't see whether physical therapy works.
argmin.net
Come the fuck on. I'd be less annoyed if there wasn't a deep-pocketed, credulous audience for this idiocy.
AI 2040: Plan A
The least bad plan we currently know of
blog.aifutures.org
Physical therapy and how it straddles the line between science and craft.
Range of Motion
Physical therapy and how it straddles the line between science and craft.
argmin.net
Unfortunately, you are required to read 10000 words of motivated reasoning by Rose Horowitch to engage with this argument. I don't make the rules.
Max Read@maxread.info · 4w agothe 'post-literacy'/'new orality' consensus is getting so strong im feeling positive its wrong 😎
Is physical therapy backed by hard science, or is the hard science a post hoc justification of best practice?
Science or bro-science?
Is physical therapy backed by hard science or artisanry?
argmin.net
I like that this paragraph is wrong about RCTs, observational causal inference, AND machine learning. It's impressively wrong! (Saloni's reaction is also priceless.)
Saloni@scientificdiscovery.dev · last mo.Oh no! Oh no!!
Three years of argmin and what year four might hold.
Three Years of Argmin
My annual navel-gazing post.
argmin.net
NFL Hall of Famer Chris Johnson's ALS diagnosis and the indefatigable search for treatments.
CJ2K battles ALS
Chris Johnson's ALS diagnosis and the indefatigable search for treatments.
argmin.net
My teacher and friend Dimitri Bertsekas passed away earlier this month. I wrote about his broad contributions to the field of numerical optimization and his deep impact on my writing and research.
A Tribute to Dimitri Bertsekas
My teacher and friend Dimitri Bertsekas passed away earlier this month.
argmin.net
LOL.
Transactions on Machine Learning Research@tmlrorg.bsky.social · last mo.TMLR has been facing an significant uptick in the number of submissions since the start of 2026. This is placing an extreme burden on our amazing team of reviewers & action editors. To ease this burden, TMLR will be implementing submission quotas, effective July 1. 1/n medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ann...
For my Bluesky friends, here is a summary of the Twitter war between medical doctors and tech bros over the Midjourney ultrasound vaporware.
All Data Is Good Data
How the Midjourney ultrasound project started a war between medicine and tech.
argmin.net
I'm disappointed that the heated fight between tech bros and medtwitter about midjourney ultrasound snake oil hasn't broken containment over here.
In the last day, I’ve seen a study confirming the shingle vaccine prevents dementia, and another finding it has no effect whatsoever on dementia. You’ll never guess which went viral.
Everyone strives to be a better person. So why is maxxing culture grotesque?
I Want A New Drug
Is it helpful to think of improvement as optimization?
argmin.net