Thomas Dietterich

This Hacker Conference Installed a Literal Anti-Virus Monitoring System At New Zealand's Kawaiican cybersecurity convention, organizers hacked together a way for attendees to track CO2 levels throughout the venue—even before they arrived.

Conference centers (and other public venues) should be installing these. I suppose we could also crowdsource this data if someone could make a wearable Bluetooth version. www.wired.com/story/this-h...

Monarch butterfly tracks in today’s NYT.

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/s...

I'm told arXiv received an LLM-generated fake LEAN proof. Authors don't even know how to check their "proofs" using LEAN.

I am by no means a prominent public intellectual, but my inbox is increasingly filled with messages from people who have been convinced by sycophantic chatbots that they have discovered revolutionary theories that entirely upend our scientific understanding of the universe.

If it is garbage, then you don't care if it is paywalled, right?

Opinion | The Sad and Dangerous Reality Behind ‘Her’

I agree that emotional addiction to chatbots is the number one risk of AI today. Here is a gift link to an important OpEd in the NYTimes:
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/o...

Or maybe a well-designed independent audit

There are plenty of narrow AI systems that exceed human performance. Example: AlphaFold for protein folding.

Even a simple calculator beats humans at arithmetic.

Properly-deployed, AI can help us address many important problems.

We Can Now Track Individual Monarch Butterflies. It’s a Revelation.

Love this new technology from Cellular Tracking Technology for tracking Monarch butterflies. Great NYTimes story.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/s...

There has been a Promethean thread throughout the history of AI. Bezos is bringing it out into the open.

Yes, maybe that’s the fix. It still feels a bit slippery

Good question. I've thought a bit about this but can't decide. If memory is free, you could remember everything as you suggest. But otherwise, the rules of cache management would apply, I guess.

Yes. I define learning as an increase in the knowledge of the system. At a minimum, that requires memory. Memory without generalization is "rote learning". Speaking from experience, maybe we should call generalization without memory a kind of "senior moment"?

I generally agree with your analysis here. I didn't intend my comment as an attack or as "whataboutism", but rather to have exactly this discussion. Thank you

Sorry for my confusing analogy.

I can give instructions to "agentic" LLM systems and they will execute them. That is a form of programming. I don't think the vendor of such systems is liable for every single token that is produced or action that is taken. But the vendor should be responsible for harms caused by LLM flaws

The question is how does the voting public understand the slogan. In the 60s, some folks interpreted "Peace Now" as "Let's withdraw from Vietnam" and others interpreted it as "Let's unilaterally disarm".

Machine learning is a mimicry technology, so of course these LLMs mimic us. But that is not necessarily evidence about the nature of general intelligence (i.e., intelligence more general than ours).

I agree that bad medical advice is the fault of the vendor, not the user.

OpenAI in the ChatGPT case, as well as all of these “agentic” systems that are coming on the market.

Oh, I worry! (But I still fly.)

There is a gray zone where the user tells an AI system to commit a crime (and it does). Under what conditions is the AI vendor an accessory to the crime? @rcalo.bsky.social ? Is this in your book?

Some nuance is required. If I write a computer program that prints out something libelous, for example, the vendor is not liable. But if a compiler bug causes someone to be harmed, the vendor should be liable.

So many nonsense ad hoc pipelines could be prevented by requiring that they work on synthetic data.

I tend to think of experiments as special cases of inference, since most of the problems I work on cannot be studied in experiments. But I get that many researchers see experiments as base analogy.

We are not "banning" reviews; we are just requiring peer review first. Good review articles are important for the field!

Russia and China combined have created twice as much debris as the US. China notoriously blew up a satellite as a test. It would be supreme justice if it was Chinese-sourced debris that struck the Chinese spacecraft.
www.armscontrol.org/act/2007-03/...

“Archival” and “workshop” don’t usually go together. If you can provide evidence of strong peer review, that’s the key. You may need to do that in an appeal, as we don’t have any mechanism in our submission system for providing such evidence

You still should fix the first paragraph. We will be releasing review articles and position papers, but only after they have passed peer review.

This is a very good point. It is one of the reasons why I think generic chatbots should probably be outlawed.

Here is a good use: LLMs as proof assistants in mathematical research.

Here is a bad use: Automated synthesis of misinformation for social media.

It *is* a new technology, people are trying to figure out how to use it both for good and for ill. Not all technology has a "use" when it is invented.