JOPRO

The @JOPRO_org 2025: Year in Review, with @JesParent blog.jopro.org/p/2025-year-in…

Happening now: @AHA_MediaLab @medialab with @valdemardanry

(1/2) Just dropped a new paper: "World Properties without World Models: Recovering Spatial and Temporal Structure from Co-occurrence Statistics in Static Word Embeddings". A key line of evidence for LLM "world models": linear probes recover city coordinates and historical dates from hidden states. @wesg52 & @tegmark did this with Llama-2 and got R²=0.91 for city locations. Very cool result. But is it world models or word statistics? An alternative: maybe the structure isn't emerging inside the LLM. Maybe it was already latent in training text itself, inherited from the systematic differences in how language describes different places and eras. I ran the same probes on GloVe and Word2Vec, static word embeddings from 2013-2014, trained purely on distributional statistics; no layers, no attention, no contextual processing. R²=0.71–0.87 for city coordinates (see map). And the signal is selective, not a probe artifact. Latitude, longitude, temperature: all recoverable. Elevation, GDP, population: R² goes negative. The probe finds real distributional structure, not noise. So: deflationary for world models. But inflationary for language. Co-occurrence statistics alone preserve a richer imprint of the physical world than anyone assumed. The words that surround "Nairobi" and the words that surround "Oslo" are systematically different, and that difference is enough to localize them. On a map. The structure was never in the model. It was in the corpus. 👇

Congratulations to Aida, who started working on @be_inaudible with us at the Augmentation Lab. We’re so excited to see more privacy-restoring, human-centric technology! 🦾

Join us this weekend at Envision @ Princeton! I'll be a part of the Future of AI in Education Panel alongside excellent squad of @tammykwan, Amber Berry, and Morgan Mifflin! Don't miss the rest of the lineup including: @random_walker, Pallavi Nuka, Nathan C. Walker, Steven Kelts, Liat Krawczyk, Jeffrey Oakman, Edward You, Vikram Ramaswamy, Alexander Kriebitz, Benedikt Lehnert, Michelle Ma, Noah Broestl Beyond education at large, there's already been in lots of Envision-related conversation about how technology is impacting knowledge generation, AI & careers, and being agile in a world where traditional structures and businesses are being disrupted. Looking forward to returning to @ptonenvision after a wonderful set of events form 2017-2019 IRL (and a few PandemicEra virtual events)!

@UCLA @_KarenHao Register: datax.ucla.edu/news-events/ev… #EmpireOfAI #AIGovernance #FuturesStudies

Community Event: @UCLA DataX: Karen Hao (@_karenhao) in conversation with @safiyaunoble and Julia Powles on power, politics, and the future of AI. March 4 | 6:30 PM | UCLA (Herb Alpert School of Music) #DataXDirection.

@INCForg Proud to be a part of the @INCForg community alongside @Orthogonal_Lab ! Thank you for all your work and effort over the years.

INCF marks 16 consecutive years as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2026 Since 2011, supported open source neuroscience and mentors worldwide. Great opportunity for students and developers to make an impact in brain research. incf.org/blog/incf-mark… #INCF

Join @JOPRO_org Director @JesParent tomorrow at @Princeton for @ptonenvision 2026: envisionprinceton.com

Community Featured Event: Today at noon EST: the Brain Inspired Complexity Group @pgmid discusses Bunge's "The Complexity of Simplicity" (1962) — w David Krakauer @sfiscience joining as a guest. Highly recommended by JOPRO members! ➡️ braininspired.co/complexity-gro…

Startup Accelerator Opportunity: For all @UofCalifornia students/alumni: UC Launch Accelerator's next round of applications closes FEB 4. More info: uclaunch.com/events

"​Small Hassles Court is a digital game where players practice different approaches to interpersonal conflict resolution and self-governance." Register: luma.com/xlznwben

Join our colleagues at @plottwistersorg today as they present their seminar on via @metagov_project's Governable Space-Makers Fellowship!

Check out our year-end update and outlook for plans ahead. Announcements of internships, opportunities, and workshops are coming soon!

The @JOPRO_org 2025: Year in Review, with @JesParent blog.jopro.org/p/2025-year-in…

Upcoming Social: Paul Samson on Artificial Intelligence Scenarios and Global Governance Hosted by @HarvardSTS Location: Cambridge & Virtual

Check your emails for the CFP for EI 2026! @JOPRO_org will be submitting once again as part of @CognitionFuture and our partners at @Orthogonal_Lab.

REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS What do we need to build to prepare the world for advanced AI? >$25 billion is about to flow into AI resilience and AI-for-science from the OpenAI Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and other major funders. But there's no shovel-ready list of the essential projects to build, and no critical mass of builders ready to execute. We're trying to fix that with The Launch Sequence, a collection of concrete projects to accelerate science, strengthen security, and adapt institutions to future advanced AI. We're opening up The Launch Sequence for new pitches. We'll help you develop your idea, connect you with funders, and get it built. $10,000 honorarium for published proposals. 🔗 Read the RFP and submit a short pitch (200–400 words): ifp.org/rfp-launch We’re looking for short pitches in three areas: 1. Accelerating science: What do researchers need to make breakthroughs with AI that markets and conventional grants won’t fund fast enough? 2. Strengthening security: What tools, technologies, or orgs can help ensure rapid AI advances don't undermine national security and public safety? 3. Adapting institutions: How do our institutions need to evolve to help society adapt to AI-driven change while preserving human agency? Our advisory panel: – @woj_zaremba, OpenAI co-founder – @tkalil2050, CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy – @matthewclifford, Co-founder & Chair of Entrepreneurs First, founding Chair of ARIA On top of the $10,000 honorarium, we offer a $1,000 bounty for pitching an idea we hadn’t heard before (if we publish it), and for every successful referral. Submissions are rolling, but we'll prioritize early pitches (within the next few weeks) and start reviewing immediately.

Will be around the Media Lab & Cambridge this weekend: