Weird and cool
Clearly, the world is making too much sense right now, so we’re looking for something that’s harder to understand. The soothing familiarity of paradoxes, unreliable narrators, and vague allusions.
Just arrived in San Francisco! I'll be speaking at Unity's AI event on Thursday, if you want to see me talk. I'm also generally around for the next few days and can be convinced to meet over a cup of tea.
unity.com/events/gdc
Please tell me you have an answer
People are talking this way too literally. Here’s something I wrote some time ago to try to articulate the feeling:
togelius.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-...
Or maybe it’s another feeling? Who knows.
Yeah, but computers are just full of words. They’re not real, in some sense. I know, we built a world based on all these words moving around and doing things to each other. But since the words have started reproducing, I feel they’ve lost the right to be real.
draft lab ai policy, feel free to use, modify, or discuss! todd.gureckislab.org/2026/03/06/g...
I’ve for a long time been trying to pin down and articulate a feeling I have that we are completely wrong in seeing producing words as taking actions. Speech acts are a lie. Haven’t succeeded yet. But anyway, this is funny:
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
this is a muscle you will have to train because kustov is just being honest about what i suspect many other people are now doing. someone that is lazy enough to do hate click content is lazy enough to have a computer generate said content.
Saving peer review from AI slop requires getting rid of anonymous submissions and reviews
togelius.blogspot.com/2026/03/savi...
Once again, a long post with strong opinions. It's probably twice as long as it should be, it's also repetitive and written in affect. And you probably disagree with my argument. So maybe you shouldn't read it. On the other hand, most things worth reading are written in affect.
RLC2026 Call for Workshops!
We’re already live: openreview.net/group?id=rl-...
Here's the opportunity to help shape the conference & spotlight your own RL focus areas.
Call: rl-conference.cc/call_for_wor...
Deadline: Mar 12 (AoE)
And don't forget the awesome banquet :) www.cirquedusoleil.com/ludo
the AI evangelists are not okay
AI guys who think the AI likes them are more pathetic than the guys who think the strippers like them.
Haha, this one was written about 5 years before chatgpt launched. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/conver...
So maybe the real AGI benchmark was game design all the time!
But really, playing all the top games on the App Store or Steam without having been trained on them is maybe just the beginning; how about independently designing those games? Designing new and good games _should_ be harder than playing them, because it requires being able to play what you design.
As we were just about to release this paper, I was contacted by Lance Ying at MIT who told me that he's led a team implementing something close to what we propose in the paper. Check it out, very cool stuff:
aigamestore.org
You can read the paper, by myself,
@smearle.bsky.social, Graham Todd, and Georgios Yannakakis here:
julian.togelius.com/Togelius2026...
Yes, that's not an arXiv link, because arXiv doesn't accept unpublished position/survey papers anymore. O tempora, o mores!
How can it be that modern LLMs are so bad at playing games? Aren't they supposed to be generally intelligent? Honestly, they are better at coding games than playing them. Maybe programming is just a particular type of game? Our new position paper tackles these questions.
So… which one of them is it again? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it because I think I’ve seen all of the Star Wars movies, but I can’t remember which one it is or what it is about.
Jobs! The Autotelic Interaction Research Group is looking for (1) creative practitioners and (2) theory researchers to work on "Autotelic Creative Artificial Intelligence" (ACAI):
(1) PhD in Creative Practices (2+2 years): lnkd.in/dPBG47rM
(2) Postdoctoral Researcher (2 years): lnkd.in/dMisM_bf
So, the latest wave of LLM tools for coding enable building systems that abstract away the whole "coding" part entirely. If there are going to be software factories, how do you make them *worker-owned* factories? www.anildash.com/2026/02/11/c...
My wife is a systems engineer who currently builds LLM-based tools to read and run simulations of systems engineering models. The models are still needed, the systems are still complex, simulations will still need to be run.
This is why I always verify the results when I use AI
No, but maybe I should look into it!
I love this piece. How interesting and complex your sense of your own problem-solving is here, and fwiw having looked at a lot of research about ability and math, I do not think math is the single "thing" we act like it is and I believe our diverse and different methods of problem-solving are needed
