This week at the Simons Institute, a workshop on Diffusion Generative Modeling: Progress and Next Steps simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/di...

Diffusion Generative Modeling: Progress and Next Steps

Diffusion models are now the de facto approach to generative modeling across a wide range of data modalities including images, audio, videos, and visuomotor policies. In recent years, there has been a...

simons.berkeley.edu

Simons Institute Director Venkat Guruswami has been honored this summer with STOC and CCC 2026 Test of Time Awards for papers that transformed coding theory and pseudorandomness, and emerged from a common algebraic core. simons.berkeley.edu/news/guruswa...

Guruswami Receives Test of Time Awards at STOC and CCC 2026

We’re delighted to share that Simons Institute Director Venkatesan Guruswami has been honored this summer with two 2026 Test of Time Awards for papers that transformed coding theory and pseudorandomne...

simons.berkeley.edu

In robotics, "there are problems to be solved which are to do with shortage of data and only when we solve them will we solve robotics," said @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social's Jitendra Malik at the Simons Institute's workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning.

Congratulations to all the #ICM2026 Fields Medal and Abacus Medal recipients! And special kudos to theoretical computer scientist Shayan Oveis Gharan, who received the Abacus Medal, and has been a program organizer and frequent long-term visitor at the Institute over the years.

Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · 2w ago

Shayan Oveis Gharan has won the Abacus Medal, one of the highest honors in theoretical computer science. Read our profile exploring how he used new mathematical tools to solve decades-old problems about route planning and random sampling: www.quantamagazine.org/shayan-oveis...

Nikhil Srivastava is now the Simons Institute’s Interim Associate Director! He succeeds Sampath Kannan, who returns to UPenn this fall. Taking Nikhil’s place as Senior Scientist is Berkeley Statistics and EECS faculty member @jasondeanlee.bsky.social. simons.berkeley.edu/news/faculty...

Faculty Leadership Team Update

As of July 1, our friend and colleague Nikhil Srivastava is the Simons Institute’s Interim Associate Director. He succeeds Sampath Kannan, who returns to UPenn this fall, after two highly successful y...

simons.berkeley.edu

Thursday and Friday this week: a workshop on Quantum Circuits and Algorithms for Cryptography simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/qu...

ICM 2026 Satellite Conference: Spectral Theory, High-Dimensional Expansion, and Pseudorandomness August 24–28 at the Simons Institute Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/ic...

Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/events/encry...

From our friends at Berkeley's Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence: Agentic AI Summit, August 1–2 Early bird pricing ends July 5 rdi.berkeley.edu/events/agent...

Agentic AI Summit 2026

Join us August 1–2, 2026 on the UC Berkeley campus for the largest summit dedicated to Agentic AI — 5,000+ attendees, world-class speakers, and a global livestream.

rdi.berkeley.edu

In case you didn't see this when it came out a couple weeks ago, here's a nice article from Harvard's FAS Current about the second batch of #1stproof, a community experiment that tests AI's capacity to do research math. current.fas.harvard.edu/stories/firs...

First Proof’s second batch of math problems test AI

Some answers were correct and solved at a high level, in a similar way to a published paper. Some were correct but were so strange or clunky they took hours for a mathematician to decipher. Some were ...

current.fas.harvard.edu

1/2 If data about the natural world lives in a low-dimensional hyperbolic space, then a large number of measurements embedded in a high-dimensional Euclidean space can preserve info. about the “curved inner world," said Tatyanna Sharpee, @salkinstitute.bsky.social, at the Simons Institute

1/3 "All data in the natural world and in neural systems have hyperbolic geometry in them," said Tatyanna Sharpee of @salkinstitute.bsky.social, at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning.

1/3 Musicians, human or avian, don't seem to care about their own mistakes when performing. But do they care how the audience — for the male zebra finch, the audience is the female of the species — responds to their singing? asked @vikramgadagkar.bsky.social at the Simons Institute.

1/5 What do zebra finches and musicians have in common? Both evaluate their performances differently in practice than while performing, said @vikramgadagkar.bsky.social of @columbiauniversity.bsky.social at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning

Congratulations to Simons Institute Director Venkat Guruswami, whose 2006 paper with Atri Rudra, “Explicit capacity-achieving list-decodable codes,” received a STOC 2026 Test of Time Award this week. Kudos to the other awardees as well! Full list here: sigact.org/prizes/stoc_...

1/2 "Many view the hard problem as needing a new kind of science to explain subjective experience. We view the hard problem as a challenge to show that subjective consciousness surely is computational," said @lenoreblum.bsky.social at the Simons Institute.

1/3 Besides "robotic, embodied systems, AI systems never see the real world. They only see these artifacts humans create & feed into them...From these [snapshots of reality] our AI needs to infer the world that produced these snapshots": @shiryginosar.bsky.social at the Simons Institute

1/5 Do colonies of weaver ants—which build nests using leaves and larval silk—have a collective will and what does this have to do with the intent of individual ants? Ofer Feinerman, @weizmanninstitute.bsky.social, asked these questions at the Simons Institute.

1/3 Rich Sutton's Bitter Lesson might not be the right lesson, said @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social's Alyosha Efros at the Simons Institute. Sutton wrote, "The actual contents of minds are...irredeemably complex; we should stop trying to find simple ways to think about the contents of minds."

1/3 Is the prefrontal cortex (PFC) relatively large in humans? No, said biologist Robert Barton of @durham.ac.uk, at the Simons Institute. They found "no evidence that the human frontal regions, including PFC, are disproportionately expanded relative to the rest of the brain".

1/2 "I see brains like exotic fruits growing on the tree of life. My work [tries] to understand how and why we see this diversity," said evolutionary biologist Robert Barton, @durham.ac.uk, at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning

1/4 The human caregiving model could help solve the alignment problem—"how do you get the goals of the AI aligned with your goals", said @alisongopnik.bsky.social at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/alison...

“If we had consciousness in AI, it’d be God,” said Ken Nakayama, @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social/ @harvard.edu) somewhat in jest, comparing biological and AI consciousness, at the Simons Institute w/shop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning simons.berkeley.edu/talks/ken-na...

1/2 The Return of RNNs. "AI is still lacking a good memory mechanism...We are in this era of 'attention is all you need' but I don't think that's going to cut it," said @phillipisola.bsky.social of @mit.edu at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning

1/2 Generative world model (GWM) theories are correlated with theories that aren't world model theories, such as the Bayesian brain theory, said @gallantlab.org at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning. simons.berkeley.edu/talks/jack-g...

1/4 World models are all the rage in both neuroscience and AI. But does the brain really build world models? Jack Gallant (@ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social) asked at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/jack-g...

1/3 "Our conclusion is that AI consciousness is inevitable." In back-to-back talks, Manuel Blum and @lenoreblum.bsky.social of @cmu.edu discuss the Conscious Turing Machine and AI consciousness at the Simons Institute workshop on The Role of TCS in Modern Machine Learning

1/2 Are LLMs doomed to hallucinate? No, says OpenAI's Adam Kalai at the Simons Institute workshop on The Role of TCS in Modern Machine Learning. "I don’t think it’s an inevitable problem. We can drastically reduce the amount of hallucinations." Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/adam-k....

1/2"Machine Learning is starting to look very different from what it looked like before": Tom Mitchell of @cmu.edu at the Simons Institute workshop on The Role of TCS in Modern Machine Learning. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tom-mi...

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.