Christopher Manning

Hi everyone

I was denied entry, detained, and deported from the USA over the last 48 hours because of my reporting on the Columbia student protests

I arrived back in Melbourne hours ago and had my phone handed back to me upon landing

An Open-Source AI Agent for Doing Tasks on the Web | Stanford HAI NNetNav learns how to navigate websites by mimicking childhood learning through exploration.

Stanford scholars introduced an open-source AI agent that learns how to navigate websites by mimicking childhood learning – an approach that could lead to more efficient, transparent, and privacy-conscious AI: hai.stanford.edu/news/an-open...

@chrmanning.bsky.social @shikharmurty.bsky.social

Science Under Threat in the United States: How scientists and institutions should respond Individual researchers and university leaders need to make the case for science to their elected representatives and to the public at large.

Science is under threat in the US. @elife.bsky.social have commissioned a series of articles discussing the implications and what we can do. The first three articles are now live. More to follow:
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...

US tech firms - IME - rely heavily on grads of higher ed in general, and US higher ed in particular...

And yet I've not heard much noise from the Pichais, Nadellas, Zuckerbergs, Cooks, Benioffs, Sus, Jassys, Huangs, etc. about attacks on higher education...

Am I missing it or does it not exist?

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past

1. @alisongopnik.bsky.social, Cosma Shalizi, James Evans and myself have a new piece in Science on "AI" Large Models, pushing back against much of the collective wisdom about what they can and can't do. Official below, unpaywalled at henryfarrell.net/large-ai-mod... . So why this now?

The New York Times is the first to put out comprehensive estimates on the cost of a year without U.S.A.I.D. and they’re higher than I thought:
- 1.65 million deaths from AIDS
- 500,000 from lack of vaccines
- 550,000 from lack of food aid
- 290,000 from malaria
- 310,000 from TB

Chinese nationals banned from US student visas under new House GOP proposal Rep. Riley Moore is leading a bill to ban Chinese nationals from getting student visas in the U.S.

If you asked me to come up with ways to sabotage America from within, I wouldn’t do as good a job as Republicans have done this year.

Just a bottomless pit of economic self owns.

EU–CPTPP Integration: A Strategic Roadmap in a Multipolar World In an era of shifting global trade dynamics and rising geopolitical tensions, the European Union (EU) faces a critical strategic choice.

… China to join the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership)?

www.scmp.com/opinion/worl...

EU–CPTPP Integration: A Strategic Roadmap in a Multipolar World In an era of shifting global trade dynamics and rising geopolitical tensions, the European Union (EU) faces a critical strategic choice.

The US 🇺🇸 under Trump is pretty decisively committed to unilateral on-whim trade tariffs. For countries like Canada 🇨🇦 and Australia 🇦🇺 that still believe in rules-based free trade, maybe it’s time to think much more seriously about getting the EU and then …

moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/03/14/e...

I’m fascinated by both Schumer’s logics and by the reaction to his logics from the Dems. The former is Schumer’s failure to understand the broader anger toward Congress. The latter is the public’s failure to understand the trap that the GOP set re the administrative state. There is no win here.

An introductory talk by @chrmanning.bsky.social on “Large Language Models in 2025 – How much understanding and intelligence?” at the Workshop on a Public AI Assistant to Worldwide Knowledge at Stanford, covering 3 eras of LLMs, RAG, Agents, DeepSeek-R1, using LLMs, ….

Video: youtu.be/5Aer7MUSuSU

I am concerned about AI but late at night, alone working on a proposal, I was glad ChatGPT had my back as I hit submit 😀.. Reminded me of @chrmanning.bsky.social’s mention in a talk of the 'Real World Utility Test' - early adoption of tech moves forward when it’s genuinely useful, concerns and all.

Portrait photo of Ellen Voorhees

Source: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Of course, information context, provenance and accuracy are still vital, just as when looking at the underlying documents.

Also, factoid question answering as in this TREC-8 QA track was deployed earlier but LLMs gives us much more powerful QA.

As @NIST Scientist Emeritus Ellen Voorhees said in 2000 (!), IR focused on “retrieving a ranked list of documents” but often “a user has a specific question and would much prefer that the system return the answer itself”.

It’s super to see this becoming reality with neural LLMs!

In 2013, at AKBC 2013 and other workshops, I gave a talk titled “Texts are Knowledge”. This was well before there were any transformer LLMs—indeed before the invention of attention—and my early neural NLP ideas were rudimentary.

🔮 Nevertheless, the talk was quite prophetic!

But one error that I think was made throughout was too large “Phone Booth” rooms. Everywhere there could have been 3, there are 2 too large ones. Phone booths are occupied by 1 person on Zoom or 2 doing a 1:1. Not 3 or 4. Besides, for groups of 3–6, there are also many “Conversation” rooms.

The new Computing and Data Science (CoDa) building at @stanforduniversity.bsky.social is beautiful, with many lovely spaces, and a great, if already too crowded, Voyager Coffee coffee shop.

news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

How Disruptive Is DeepSeek? Stanford HAI Faculty Discuss China’s New Model Experts weigh in on the implications of DeepSeek’s open-source model and its impact on technology, geopolitics, the arts, and more.

In this collection of perspectives, @stanfordhai.bsky.social senior fellows offer a multidisciplinary discussion of what #DeepSeek means for AI and society at large. hai.stanford.edu/news/how-dis...

@chrmanning.bsky.social @jlanday.bsky.social @yejinchoinka.bsky.social @amyzegart.bsky.social

Picture of part of iOS screen showing lack of text option

How can it be that the Apple iOS data detector pop-up gives you options to call or copy but not text?

We’re not in the twentieth century any more. The twenty-first century is almost a quarter done.

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Want to make a browser agent for *any* domain like banking or healthcare?
We propose methods for training LLMs with open-ended, unsupervised interaction on live websites:
✅ OSS SoTA on WebVoyager
✅ world's smallest high-performing web-agent
Try it here: nnetnav.dev

💯

DeepSeek’s rise shows why China’s top AI talent is skipping Silicon Valley Young Chinese engineers focus on homegrown innovation, drawn by fewer visa hurdles and the chance to build a future on their own terms.

Maybe vilifying China & Chinese people, and increasing visa hassles & investigations aren’t smart moves for keeping the US lead in AI—given the number of engineers trained in China vs US?

“Many Chinese students are not that interested in full-time jobs in the US.”

restofworld.org/2025/china-a...

I went to a Silicon Valley AI retreat in 2019. Turned out it was run by EA and Longtermists before I knew what those things were.

One activity was to envision future scenarios involving AI.

I told a story about the dangers of regulatory capture.

I was shunned for the rest of the event.

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” A good historical perspective:

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/o...

Got my first spam message on @signal.org

I guess that’s evidence that the platform is growing?

New developments on our 'LLMs can do metalinguistics' paper!

We created sentences and had GPT3.5, 4, o1 and Llama 3 analyze them as a linguist would.

We had 3 graduate students in linguistics evaluate how good linguists LLMs really are.

I feel like I can see America changing before my eyes*

“The only lasting truth Is Change.
God Is Change.”
– Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

*Okay, maybe this feeling was exaggerated this morning by the Navy vs. Oklahoma Armed Forces Bowl game being on in the barbershop, but still …

Getting 50% (SoTA) on ARC-AGI with GPT-4o You can just draw more samples

Six months ago someone put a for-loop around GPT-4o and got 50% on the ARC-AGI test set and 72% on a held-out training set redwoodresearch.substack.com/p/getting-50... Just sample 8000 times with beam search.

o3 is probably a more principled search technique...

How Seattle Could Rescue Small Retail The city government could buy up leases for empty storefronts and then market them at low rates to non-profits and small retail shops.

Just got back from Vancouver and I was amazed at how their downtown is full of cool little small businesses. The secret is … socialism? The government takes over leases of long-vacant spaces and sublets small subdivisions to locally-owned businesses and nonprofits.

www.postalley.org/2020/07/20/h...