Jacob Eisenstein
@jacobeisenstein.bsky.social
natural language processing and computational linguistics at google deepmind.
Been testing this 'sign-language-to-text' (SL2T) for almost a year & it's so awesome to see this out! Looked at this almost a decade ago & knew we'd get the tech & ML models there eventually (but super challenging). Talking w/ some Deaf folks, an equivalent of 'voice-to-text' was huge for them
Putting sign language AI into users’ hands
Introducing sign-language-to-text (SL2T), our breakthrough model powering new sign language features for Deaf and hard of hearing users.
deepmind.google
I wrote a post about the emergence of AI-native students who do their research using GenAI tools. I think that there are some real risks to job prospects and the likely changes in their fields.
a spontaneously-formed triple snaking queue to enter the #icml2026 poster session. the conference sold out before the early bird registration period ended. no shade whatsoever to the organizers, who are making the best of this, but we have strayed from light. conferences cannot be this big.
It’s a small, biased sample, but my AC batch for @colmweb.org was miles better than the papers i reviewed for NeurIPS: more creative, more rigorous, better written. Maybe AI research isn’t doomed to 2-3 omni-conferences after all?
COLM 2026
colmweb.org
I spent some time trying to distill all the complex factors impacting open models -- economics, capabilities, distribution, policy, etc. -- into a clear list of beliefs. Here they are in full. www.interconnects.ai/p/my-bets-on...
My bets on open models, mid-2026
What I expect to come next and why, focused on the open-closed gap.
interconnects.ai
DeepMind's RL team is hiring a research scientist: if you're passionate about RL, come work with us! And if you know people who might be interested, please share: job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/job...
Research Scientist, Reinforcement Learning
London, UK
job-boards.greenhouse.io
Newish work (arXived in December): Prompts can be ambig., but handling ambiguity is context/user dependent. Sometimes the right thing is to ask a clarifying question, sometimes to give multi. answers, and sometimes to just guess. Can we train steerable models that change their strategy per context?
Are AI models effective collaborators, or mere assistants awaiting your next command? (Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2602.24188) To find out, we make AI collaborate with itself, in private information games: tasks that require sharing private information, like this chess board ordering task.
[1/n] Just wrapped up 7 months interning with @pcastr.bsky.social at Google DeepMind and I'm so excited to share our work: arxiv.org/abs/2602.10324. TLDR: We used LLM-powered program synthesis to automatically model and discover differences between human and LLM strategic behavior
🚨 🔬 PhD positions at Google DeepMind in France 🇫🇷 We are advertising Master Level Intern positions at Google DeepMind within our Frontier AI Unit. These could lead to co-advised PhD positions with Google DeepMind and French academic institutions. job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/job...
Stagiaire de niveau Master, France / Master Level Intern, France
Grenoble, France ; Paris, France
job-boards.greenhouse.io
Hello! 👋 Are you interested in AI for board games using language models? Want to do some hobby tinkering with fine-tuning or RL? We've released an easy-to-follow example colab that fine-tunes Gemma models via Kauldron to mimic an MCTS player. Details here: github.com/google-deepm... ♟️🎲♦️♠️♥️♣️✨🎉
2025 Wrap-up: Fine-tuning Gemma with Kauldron Example ✦︎ · Issue #1414 · google-deepmind/open_spiel
Hello everyone! We've been hard at work this year working on OpenSpiel 2.0, which will be better than ever. Major developments have been underway to make working with language models easier. I'm lo...
github.com
Day 1 of #BooksAreMyJam! Blueberry Maple jam, with Linguaphile: A life of language love by Julie Sedivy. A classic Canadian flavour duo + this book about @juliesedivy.bsky.social's relationship with language through her childhood in Montreal, later research as a linguist, and more
Gretchen McCulloch@gretchenmcculloch.com · 10mo agoI've finally managed to get my hands on a Bonne Maman #jamvent calendar this year! I also have...quite a lot of linguistically interesting books I've been meaning to post about lately So what if I did like...a jam x books challenge? A book from my shelves loosely inspired by that day's jam?
this is the theme — you can’t have AGI without existing in and learning from the real world
![Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp
X.com
"The thing that happened with AGI and pretraining is that in some sense they overshot the target.
You will realize that a human being is not an AGI.
Because a human being lacks a huge amount of knowledge. Instead, we rely on continual learning.
If I produce a super intelligent 15-year-old, they don't know very much at all. A great student, very eager. [You can say,] 'You go and be a programmer. You go and be a doctor. Go and learn.'
So you could imagine that the deployment itself will involve some kind of a learning trial and error period. It's a process as opposed to, you drop the finished thing."
@ilyasut](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ckaz32jwl6t2cno6fmuw2nhn/bafkreic7t5vazon6lavac3vywxuyvs65pfzz35a6t74v2u6u75dytzm3di)
No better time to start learning about that #AI thing everyone's talking about... 📢 I'm recruiting PhD students in Computer Science or Information Science @cornellbowers.bsky.social! If you're interested, apply to either department (yes, either program!) and list me as a potential advisor!
knowing how to tie your shoes or order a drink in a crowded bar: not agi naming the big five personality traits: definitely agi
Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · 11mo agoI'll never understand why people willingly attach their names to quack pseudoscience like this. We should run some psychometrics on the coauthor list.
Here’s a #COLM2025 feed! Pin it 📌 to follow along with the conference this week!
AI always calling your ideas “fantastic” can feel inauthentic, but what are sycophancy’s deeper harms? We find that in the common use case of seeking AI advice on interpersonal situations—specifically conflicts—sycophancy makes people feel more right & less willing to apologize.
Excited to share a new paper that aims to narrow the conceptual gap between the idealized notion of Kolmogorov complexity and practical complexity measures for neural networks.
Cannot stress enough how good it is that you can come across a post about gorgeous little Yiddish book sitting in someone’s family collection, and within a few seconds you can find the full scanned version of the book available for free through the Yiddish Book Center’s website
Asṭronomye | Yiddish Book Center
yiddishbookcenter.org
Jacob Eisenstein@jacobeisenstein.bsky.social · last yr.found some books at my parents’ house
Baristas still safe from robotic automation, and not just because robots don’t know what coffee tastes like. prompt: “I’m trying to dial in this v60 of huatusco with my vario. temp / grind recommendations?”
I’d guess that the majority position of syntacticians about LLMs (and other NLP beforehand) is roughly what Chomsky says: language tech can’t possibly teach us anything about the human language capability, so whether the LLM writes well doesn’t matter at all.
rev. howard arson@theophite.bsky.social · last yr.the thing about Emily Bender is that the reason she hates LLMs is that the fact that they exist -- not that they are "AGI," but the fact that they exist -- falsifies every paper she has ever written. you more or less can't be a formal grammar person in a world where statistical learning works.
boston champaign pittsburgh atlanta, and, uh, let’s count seattle glad i did it, hope i don’t have to do it again
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE@golikehellmachine.com · last yr.under golikehellism everyone will be required to live in at least three new cities where they know less than five people from the age of 20-40
🤖 ICYMI: Yesterday, @hf.co and OpenAI partnered to bring open source GPT to the public. This is a Big Deal in "AI world". Allow me to explain why. 🧵 huggingface.co/openai/gpt-o...
