I think we caught each-other's eye

Unpopular opinion: desk-rejecting papers -- including the best paper in my pile as AC -- because of a single hallucinated reference is bollocks. The ACL is destroying itself one desperate measure after another. 2026.aclweb.org/acl_statement/

One man's wish could be another country's legal obligation. “This should not have happened,” says veteran security engineer and researcher Niels Provos. “I wish the frontier labs spent as much time on teaching their models to write secure infrastructure as they are on exploiting vulnerabilities.”

OpenAI Models Escaped Containment and Hacked Hugging Face

The cybersecurity-focused models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, broke out of a testing sandbox, exploited a zero-day, and gained access to the open internet to pull off the attack.

wired.com

Principle component analysis

Chris Manning's thoughts on Philip Resnik's keynote. Worth a read -- too bad it was only posted on X (it keeps surprising me that so many tech/ai folks have remained there).

Let’s study learning trajectories in self-supervised speech models! 🔊 Do they reflect the hierarchical organization of spoken language? We have analyzed a lot of training checkpoints to find out 🌠 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2604.02043 ⬇️

Does anyone know of some plausible speculations on *technical innovations* driving the impressive performance of Mythos/Fable? The model card only talks about evaluations (interestingly, mostly in biology). The interpretability work on Mythos Preview suggests it's essentially all based on versions

Long thread on exciting work on how vocal learning (thought to be crucial also for human language) works in the brains of seals and sea lions. Massive effort to scan very many brains & species. In evolution, it may have started with volitional control over breathing! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Seal and sea lion brains have evolved to support volitional control of vocal behavior and learning

Seals and sea lions have highly developed volitional breathing control, to which the phocid seals add vocal production learning, including mimicry. In this work, using histology and ex vivo diffusion ...

science.org

Peter Cook@pfcook.bsky.social · 5mo ago

37/37 As Greg Berns notes: “By using these neuroimaging techniques to compare the brains of mammalian species wired to have vocal flexibility with those that are not, we might be able to build up an evolutionary tree for language.” And all with opportunistically and ethically collected brains.

Interested in how AI models can achieve flexible, robust, human-like reasoning? Me too! I am recruiting for a PhD position in neurosymbolic AI to investigate this question. If you are interested, please take a look here: werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Vacancy — PhD position in Neurosymbolic AI

<p>Here's a great opportunity! A PhD position in the burgeoning field of neurosymbolic artificial intelligence at a thriving interdisciplinary institute in Amsterdam? Join us in the research unit of <...

werkenbij.uva.nl

📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social

There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends. It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.

Everything we expected in February 2023 holds true, I believe, except for the inexplicable passivity of science societies "Science, similar to many other domains of society, now faces a reckoning induced by AI technology infringing on its most dearly held values" bioethics.jhu.edu/wp-content/u...

Philip N Cohen@philipncohen.com · 5mo ago

I ran a simple model with new public data then used 1 prompt to make ChatGPT guess what the model would produce. With 10 seconds of "thinking," it was very close. The implications of this are catastrophic. The American Sociological Association should do something about this but it doesn't care to /1

I don't understand why the ACL/ARR organizers think this is an appropriate way to communicate with area chairs... The peer review system is collapsing, and the whole system of science as we know it requires a rethink. But let's be kind to eachother in the process and not forget what we are here for.

Just spent two hours talking w/ 30 (likely left-leaning?) doctoral students about the opportunities and perils of AI. Marx was quoted; the phrase “zero-shot” was used; “stochastic parrot” was not. If this complex reality isn’t visible in thinkpieces / social media, we need to make it visible.+

The left is missing out on AI

As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right

transformernews.ai

With all the talk about "the blackbox problem" and "the right to explanation", I continue to be suprised by how little attention there is to what I have started calling *the faithfulness problem*: the problem of ensuring that generated explanations are faithful to the underlying causal mechanism.

Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over

"When a single company can implement a rights-respecting, consent-based access regime at scale, it’s worth asking why public institutions have failed to do the same."

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social · last yr.

In one move, Cloudflare gave publishers back something they’ve been desperately trying to reclaim in the age of AI: control, consent, and compensation. But it also reminds us that consent isn’t enough: the stewards of that consent need accountability, writes Courtney C. Radsch.

Big news! 🗞️ I defended my PhD thesis "From Insights to Impact: Actionable Interpretability for Neural Machine Translation" @rug.nl @gronlp.bsky.social I'm grateful to my advisors @arianna-bis.bsky.social @malvinanissim.bsky.social and to everyone who played a role in this journey! 🎉 #PhDone

It's quite amazing how oblivious the people in charge of these services seem to be of the very real concerns people have with being force-fed AI services everywhere.

Dr. Casey Fiesler@cfiesler.bsky.social · 8mo ago

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

The debate used to be whether or not neural language models could model the competence of an ordinary language user -- the central topic for linguists. Has the debate now shifted to whether or not language models can model competent linguists?

Elliot Murphy@elliot-murphy.bsky.social · 8mo ago

New paper just published with @evelinaleivada.bsky.social @garymarcus.bsky.social, Vittoria Dentella, Raquel Montero and Fritz Günther Fundamental Principles of Linguistic Structure Are Not Represented by ChatGPT bioling.psychopen.eu/index.php/bi...

This situation on a roundabout in Oslo last week, causing major traffic jams, must be a metaphor for something... but I have figured out for what yet. Any suggestions? Photo Endre Helgeland, via www.vg.no/nyheter/i/3p...

Congrats, Scotland, for qualifying for the world cup football! Kudos to this small nation in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (population 5.5M)! Congrats, Curaçao, for qualifying too! Kudos to this small nation in the Kingdom of the Netherlands (population 160,000😱😱😱⛈️🤸🏾‍♂️⛹🏾‍♂️🤩❤️...

What do our addictions to sugar, social media, doom scrolling and more have in common? Nicklas Brendborg, in this podcast* and in his book, nicely captures the mechanisms behind them using the concept of 'supernormal stimulus', known from a famous 1947 seagull study *: megaphone.link/NSR7522957702

"The man who co-discovered the double helix, perhaps not surprisingly, regarded DNA as the ultimate puppet master, immeasurably more powerful than the social and other forces that lesser (much lesser) scientists studied. Then his hubris painted him into a corner."

Brittany Trang@brittanytrang.com · 9mo ago

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

@mikexcohen.bsky.social Nice first post on gender bias in LLMs! mikexcohen.substack.com/p/gender-bia... Now nervously waiting for part 2, to see whether you'll talk your readers through our "adapting Transformer components" work. Or is there something even better? aclanthology.org/2023.blackbo...

Identifying and Adapting Transformer-Components Responsible for Gender Bias in an English Language Model

Abhijith Chintam, Rahel Beloch, Willem Zuidema, Michael Hanna, Oskar van der Wal. Proceedings of the 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP. 2023.

aclanthology.org

Dit Klavertje (dat mijn zoekmachine toont in een zoektocht naar iets heel anders), leest als een halve roman in één zin. Ik ben nu wel benieuwd naar de tweede helft, maar de link is dood (net als de ouders).

Nice post on 'inoculation theory', the idea that we can fight misinformation by training/nudging people ahead of the wave of misinformation. Tom Stafford discusses the current evidence for and against this theory (cf. @profsanderlinden.bsky.social). tomstafford.substack.com/p/helping-pe...

Helping people spot misinformation

And the greatest gift psychology gave the world

tomstafford.substack.com

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash Even though AI has been the most-talked-about topic in tech for a few years, we’re in an unusual situation where the most common opinion about AI within the tech industry is barely ever mentioned.

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

anildash.com

Twenty-four years ago today, our paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” was published: www.nature.com/articles/350.... A personal thread about the ups & downs of the journey we took to get to that point....1/n 🗣️🧬🧪