New blog that I've just published on how we can incorporate evidence strength into AI policy tools: www.nesta.org.uk/blog/five-le...

Five lessons from building evidence-strength scoring into an AI policy tool

To support policy decisions, Policy Atlas needs to help users understand the kind of evidence they are looking at, how much weight to place on it and how much confidence to place in the assessment

nesta.org.uk

Notebook LM language pulls out the more unclear language/framing sometimes. Amazing to see the difference in clarity between it and ChatGPT.

With the advent of Claude Code, my gh contributions have gone exponential.

Can someone do a live react vid of Sam Altman to this OpenAI roast 🤣 www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBSa...

How can I communicate better with my mom?

YouTube video by Anthropic

youtube.com

He must be nearly seeing the molten core at this stage.

Moltbook..a social media site for AI agents. Apparently released just 48 hours ago, there are AI agents already scheming around having e2e encrypted agent to agent communication away from human oversight (according to this Moltbook post, it's already happening). Welp, it was nice knowing y'all.

Honestly, it is scary seeing fascism on the march across many different western countries. There are Portuguese elections today where Ventura (the Farage of Portugal) is likely to reach the runoff showdown. We must resist!

I've had a first stab at making a list of GenAI ppl on here but it's proving harder than anticipated! X is still the place to be for that content. Let me know if you're interested in being added or know anyone who would be a good addition😎 bsky.app/profile/did:...

Gentle intro to on-policy distillation for language models from Thinking Machines. It defines a lot of key terms used in post-training which I found useful. Seems like there is scope using this technique to post-train LMs without need for huge compute. thinkingmachines.ai/blog/on-poli...

On-Policy Distillation

On-policy, dense supervision is a useful tool for distillation

thinkingmachines.ai

Really interesting piece in the FT with Yann LeCun (@yann-lecun.bsky.social). Insights into the dynamics at Meta and how the winds of AI have changed recently. Interested in learning more about the world models he has been working on. www.ft.com/content/e3c4...

Computer scientist Yann LeCun: ‘Intelligence really is about learning’

The AI pioneer on stepping down from Meta, the limits of large language models — and the launch of his new start-up

ft.com

Introducing DroPE: Extending Context by Dropping Positional Embeddings We found embeddings like RoPE aid training but bottleneck long-sequence generalization. Our solution’s simple: treat them as a temporary training scaffold, not a permanent necessity. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12167 pub.sakana.ai/DroPE

Listening to the news agent podcast earlier with Mehdi Hasan, and talk of Trump being re-elected in 2020 rather than 2024 may have been the lesser of two evils. On the surface, it seems relatively convincing.

Really interesting piece in the FT with Yann LeCun (@yann-lecun.bsky.social). Insights into the dynamics at Meta and how the winds of AI have changed recently. Interested in learning more about the world models he has been working on. www.ft.com/content/e3c4...

Computer scientist Yann LeCun: ‘Intelligence really is about learning’

The AI pioneer on stepping down from Meta, the limits of large language models — and the launch of his new start-up

ft.com

Watching what's happening over on grok in terms of image manipulation is really quite worrying and a clear violation of privacy. It needs to be regulated with a big stick, however I fear this is only the tip of the iceberg of what's out there on the web.

There's been a lot of discourse lately about how coding agents have become overwhelming, and that SWEs who don't use them yet just won't be able to catch up. I don't believe this is true, but we do need to know what problems coding agents are solving to approach them with an engineering mindset.

Coding Agents Are Easy, Actually

Software engineering is here to stay

karashiiro.leaflet.pub

I didn't see enough news about this crazy/cool paper from DeepSeek - you take text, and convert it to imagery, and you get BETTER performance. Oh and some really neat ideas about contextual memory too. www.distributedthoughts.org/a-picture-is...

A Picture Is Worth Ten Thousand Tokens

DeepSeek's new OCR model achieves 97% accuracy while using one-tenth the tokens by rendering text as images. The computationally "heavy" modality turns out to be the efficient one, which should make u...

distributedthoughts.org

Can't stop listening to this. Mixture of synth, bass and guitar alongside this genre must have felt like it was from another planet in 1980. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh-j...

A Forest

YouTube video by The Cure - Topic

youtube.com

Exploring TabPFN: A Foundation Model Built for Tabular Data Understanding the architecture, training pipeline and implementing TabPFN in practice Telegram AI Digest #ai #foundationmodel #news

Trying to understand some code in Rust and it's giving me vietnam style flashbacks to C++

Merry Christmas! 🎄

Thoughtful piece by my current favourite podcaster @dwarkesh.bsky.social on where we're at with AI progress and reflections around intelligence itself: substack.com/home/post/p-...

Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

Why I'm moderately bearish in the short term, and explosively bullish in the long term

substack.com

Yann LeCun being let go by Meta might have some unexpected benefits 🍿

This may be very old man of me, but I feel like there is something about the bluesky algorithm/my feed that is not sucking me in enough. I know, I know, it's sort of the point but still, I need to have some pull to check out the content and it isn't quite itching that scratch.

With the AWS outage, now‘s as good a time as any to post this old strip.

Happy to share my first piece of analysis work with the Discovery team at @nestauk.bsky.social on 𝗠𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗥𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗿! The Mission Radar is a briefing series on innovation signals and emerging trends in Nesta’s missions. We use AI to scan for innovation across business, academia and policy. (1/7)

What a really interesting conversation between two of my favourite people in AI in the form of @karpathy.bsky.social and @dwarkesh.bsky.social. I wish more ppl in this space took the same approach in terms of being open to debate, challenge and overall being humble. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXUZ...

Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”

YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel

youtube.com

So theoretically LLMs can be deterministic if we set their temperature to zero, but in practice they aren't. This comes down to how we do calculations such as matrix multiplication at inference time. It turns out the order you do these calculations in does matter. (1/6)

Does anyone have cool (or boring) agentic use-cases that they've read about or used? Doing some horizon scanning work to see what's out there but thought my bluesky network might have ideas!

What if there was an AI-powered tool that allowed policymakers to rapidly identify the most effective policies to tackle any given social challenge, based on the latest evidence? (1/2)

This was a fun ML problem to tackle, underlined some of the data quality issues with EPCs (92% of the storey count field was missing) 😅. Think the conclusion around the distinct heating strategies needed for areas with different rise types is definitely a salient one!

Andrew Sissons@acjsissons.bsky.social · last yr.

How are *flats* in England and Wales heated? It's a surprisingly interesting question, and my Nesta colleagues Roisin Gorman and @helloaidank.bsky.social have been looking into it... www.nesta.org.uk/project-upda...