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 🚀
Zachary Lipton
@zacharylipton.bsky.social
Cofounder & CTO @ Abridge, Raj Reddy Associate Prof of ML @ CMU, occasional writer, relapsing 🎷, creator of d2l.ai & approximatelycorrect.com
💡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...
OpenAI folks getting creative about corporate governance. I've seen this movie before... www.theinformation.com/articles/thi...
Thinking Machines Lab CEO Has Unusual Control in Andreessen-Led Deal
It’s common nowadays for founders of hot startups to hold special shares that give them more voting power than most investors. But Mira Murati, a former OpenAI chief technology officer who is now a fo...
theinformation.com
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.
👑 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗿: Modern Healthcare names Abridge Chief Science and Chief Technology Officer Zack Lipton to its 40 Under 40 list! Learn more about the most influential leaders in healthcare here: www.modernhealthcare.com/awards/zack-... @zacharylipton.bsky.social
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
If you're already in Vancouver and like to run, join us tomorrow (Tuesday) at 7:30am in front of the Fairmont Waterfront for the first installment of #runconference @neuripsconf.bsky.social #NeurIPS2024 ! 🏃🏾🤖 cc @zacharylipton.bsky.social maps.app.goo.gl/rjrYsuYdPEv4...
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.
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.
I'm with @arjunraj.bsky.social on this one. One point is that I think it would get even harder to take risks with research & pursue potentially resource heavy projects, if one has very limited resources since u end up having less of a buffer. 1/
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...
Why long COVID may simply be 'long infection' - ABC listen
A parliamentary inquiry found between two and twenty per cent of Australians who get the virus will develop symptoms of long COVID including brain fog and fatigue, but its exact causes remain a myster...
abc.net.au
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