Tim König

"All else being equal, being able to squeeze more predictive juice out of flawed theories and inadequate paradigms will help them to stick around for longer, impeding true scientific progress."

Why an overreliance on AI-driven modelling is bad for science Without clear protocols to catch errors, artificial intelligence’s growing role in science could do more harm than good.

"Actual scientific progress happens through theories, which explain a collection of findings, and paradigms [...] We suspect that the rapid proliferation of scientific findings based on AI has not accelerated — and might even have inhibited — these higher levels of progress."

Screenshot eines Artikels der Frankfurter Rundschau, der lautet: "Philipp Amthors Vorschlag? CDU plant, das Informationsfreiheitsgesetz zu kippen: FragDenStaat vor Aus"

Moment mal...
...so schnell werdet ihr uns nicht los.

Zusammen Informationsfreiheit stärken: fragdenstaat.de/jetzt-spenden/

Give it a shot and let me know if you run into any issues. It should come in handy when you want your agent to retrieve literature for you ("What articles do I have on LLMs and computational social sciences?"), or for full-blown RAG systems, where access to your library may improve generated answers

GitHub - TimBMK/langchain-zotero-retriever: A Retriever for the Langchain eco system to access the Zotero API A Retriever for the Langchain eco system to access the Zotero API - TimBMK/langchain-zotero-retriever

While playing around with the LangChain Framework, I figured it might be convenient to let LLM Agents access your Zotero library, so I built a retriever It should become part of the langchain_community package soon, but it in the meantime it's available via Github or pip

github.com/TimBMK/langc...

Heritage Foundation and Allies Discuss Dismantling the EU The group that drafted a key blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term convened a meeting in Washington D.C. this week to consider proposals for bulldozing the European Union (EU). The Polish investiga...

The group behind the radical Project 2025 agenda is increasingly turning its attention to Europe:

www.desmog.com/2025/03/14/h...

Open positions and projects ### Open semester and Master's projects If you're an AU student looking for a semester project, a Bachelor project, or an MS thesis project, please refer to [this list](projects). ### Prospective PhD ...

I am recruiting 2 PhD students for Fall'25 @csaudk.bsky.social to work on bleeding-edge topics in #NLProc #LLMs #AIAgents (e.g. LLM reasoning, knowledge-seeking agents, and more).

Details: www.cs.au.dk/~clan/openings
Deadline: May 1, 2025

Please boost!

cc: @aicentre.dk @wikiresearch.bsky.social

In @zeit.de, @ewo.name's devastating report from #SXSW: Like it's 2023, "back when one could still innocently predict the future at tech conferences without taking into account burgeoning fascism." Again Zeit's coverage of our fall is better than our own.

It doesn't matter if people use GPT, Llama, or Gemini, or if their chatbots lose money. It doesn't matter if Deepseek's architecture reduces compute requirements, as the cost decrease will likely increase demand. To integrate LLMs at scale you need compute, and the money is in providing it. 10/10

So the large players like AWS, Microsoft etc. don't invest into these data centers to push the development of AI. They're smarter than that. Their play is that with the proliferation of LLMs across businesses (and again, applications are aplenty), the demand for compute will rise. 9/10

When deployed at large, however, even the smaller models require compute often unattainable for all but the largest providers. Due to economics of scale, only large data centers can provide at a price point profitable for both provider and (third-party) user. Hence, the need for data centers. 8/10

However, there's not just the proprietary models, but also a great open source LLM ecosystem. You could argue that the investments into proprietary models will not pay off, as there are equally good, open source solutions (think windows/linux). This remains to be seen. 7/10

The other day, somebody in the industry compared LLMs to operating systems, and I think this is a very good way to think about it. Operating systems are only viable at scale. And they're a means to an end, not the endpoint. They're only there to enable other tasks. Adaptation pays off at scale. 6/10

You could even argue that ChatGPT and other chatbots are merely there to showcase the model's capabilities. They're there to show a large user base what these models can do in terms of language understanding. It does not matter if the companies lose money on them - they're a proof of concept. 5/10

Most of these applications are not chat bots though. They're all types of tasks where you'd like your computer to be better at understanding natural language - and there's a lot of those. So part of the money is in third parties offering their clients "AI" applications for their businesses. 4/10

LLMs excell at language understanding, more so than any other technology available. And this capability can be used in a plethora of tasks - from information retrieval to human-computer-interaction to code completion. This is evidenced most strongly by third parties offering LLM integrations. 3/10

First of all, I agree with a lot of the issues Ed raises. "AI" is a marketing term. "AGI" even more so - and it can not happen within the framework of large language models. And yes, chatbots severly underdeliver in the majority of tasks they're advertised for. But that is besides the point. 2/10

There Is No AI Revolution Soundtrack: Mack Glocky - Chasing Cars Last week, I spent a great deal of time and words framing the generative AI industry as a cynical con where OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei hav...

A week ago or so I stumbled across this piece by @edzitron.com. He raises some compelling points and is asking the right question - where's the money? - but ultimately I think he is wrong. The money is there. And it's in the data centers. Let me explain. 1/10

www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-m...

At least the author answers their own question of "fragmented or shallow reviewer feedback". It's reviewer 2 - now with 2 pages of AI slop to give it the semblance of meaningful feedback

What's the Matter with Billionaires? How America's wealthiest sabotage their own prosperity (and ours) to avoid paying taxes

As another Trump-induced market crisis unfolds from tariffs, it's time we ask "What's the Matter with Billionaires?" I've run the numbers. Billionaires do better under Dems. So why do billionaires keep supporting GOP policies against their economic interests? See my latest piece on why. (TLDR 🧵⬇️)

Mannheim: Als die Herkunft bekannt wurde, machte man die Livestreams aus München, Solingen, Magdeburg: Zu allen Anschlägen gab es einen Brennpunkt in der ARD. Zur gestrigen Amokfahrt in Mannheim bisher nicht.

München, Solingen, Magdeburg: Zu allen Anschlägen gab es einen Brennpunkt in der ARD. Zur gestrigen Amokfahrt in #Mannheim bisher nicht. Warum wohl? www.volksverpetzer.de/aktuelles/ma...

Thanks to everyone who participated - as always, I learned a lot preparing the workshop and from all the engagement and smart questions!

GitHub - TimBMK/LLM-workshop-HI: Slides and Materials for a workshop on NLP, Transformers, LLMs and Agents. Taught at the University of Hildesheim, February 2025 Slides and Materials for a workshop on NLP, Transformers, LLMs and Agents. Taught at the University of Hildesheim, February 2025 - TimBMK/LLM-workshop-HI

Last week, I held a two-day workshop on NLP techniques, from Bag of Words to LLMs. Most materials are in English and include code and hands-on exercises. We covered static embeddings, classification with BERT/RoBERTa and LLMs, Model Evaluation, and finally built our own multi-agent and RAG systems!

Die Rechtstreiber der CDU Einige Wirtschaftslobbyisten und Denkfabriken untergraben aktiv die Brandmauer. Der nächste mögliche Tabubruch: eine Minderheitsregierung

Nachdem Friedrich Merz mit der AfD gestimmt hat, drängen Wirtschaftslobbyisten und CDU-nahe Akteure zum nächsten Tabubruch: Eine Minderheitsregierung.

CORRECTIV deckt auf, wer die CDU nach rechts treibt.

I was just told that I have to remove “climate” from the title of an ongoing grant if I want to keep it. And publications from that grant cannot include “climate” and other forbidden words. I can’t believe I’m writing this from the United States of America. #AcademicSky

Wir haben die Schikanen der Polizei Berlin der letzten Wochen nicht an die große Glocke gehängt: Weil wir keine Absicht dahinter vermuteten. Seit gestern wissen wir: Die Polizei hat systematisch ALLES daran gesetzt in den letzten 30 Tagen, den Adenauer SRP+ zu verhindern! Ein Thread zum SKANDAL! 🧵

: AfD will Strafmündigkeit ab zwölf Jahren

CDU-Generalsekretär Linnemann will Strafmündigkeit ab zwölf Jahren Ein 13-Jähriger soll einen 12-Jährigen in Stuttgart getötet haben. Baden-Württembergs CDU-Justizministerin Marion Gentges fordert eine wissenschaftliche Untersuchung. Ihr Generalsekretär denkt an härtere Konsequenzen.

die cdu kopiert jetzt wirklich einfach nur noch afd-forderungen

Take note: The infrastructures of democratic deliberation are under attack.
This may start in the US but will have fallout across the globe.

One way to strengthen democracy: support and protect public information access in whatever form you can.

Musk Allies Discuss Deploying A.I. to Find Budget Savings A top official at the General Services Administration said artificial intelligence could be used to identify waste and redundancies in federal contracts.

1/ I suspect we are days away from hearing Elon is "using AI" to “streamline” benefits programs.

You should know why fully automating decisions about who gets critical assistance is a terrible idea that will have disastrous consequences.

A 🧵 based on work I’ve done with the great @awhf.bsky.social