Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places)

If AI scientists are writing millions of papers, many of which are slop, and some of which are incremental progress, how would we identify the one or two which come up with an extremely productive new idea? In 1948, Shannon was one of hundreds of engineers at Bell Labs working on how to cleanly send voice signals over noisy copper wires. His paper sat in the same technical journal as reports on reducing static and building better filters. How would you recognize that he has come up with this very general framework for thinking about information and communication channels, which over the coming decades would have enormous use from domains as far apart as cryptography to genetics to quantum mechanics? It seems like it can take fields multiple decades to recognize the significance of unifying new concepts. Because it is on that time scale that the fruits of such general concepts lead to new discoveries across many different fields. We’ve managed to solve this peer review problem for human scientists (at least somewhat). Now we’ll need to do it at a much greater scale for the mass of AI science that will be thrown at us.

An obvious concern: will AI review crowd out human effort? Option A: humans maintain their level of diligence effort, but focus it on deeper thought and non-routine checks. Option B: humans get lazy and work less on diligence. 3/

Sorry to be the downer because this is an impressive story in some senses. But it is ~trivially easy to make a single mRNA vaccine. It's not hard. I cure mice of various cancers with various therapeutics all the time. I've made mice lose more weight in a month than tirzepatide does in a year. What is hard and expensive is proving its BOTH safe AND effective **in a randomized and controlled study in humans** while ALSO manufacturing it at clinical scale and grade. I am happy for this man and his dog. It is impressive. But y'all are overhyping it.

My two cents: Academia is shorting the frontier labs. There's a chasm in public conversations about AGI timelines among academia vs. frontier labs. In one world, people are openly feeling the AGI. In the other world, it's not even a thing to be discussed. It seems to me this is either because truly subjective beliefs are different... or we are in some kind of preference falsification or pluralistic ignorance equilibrium. (More on that below; I did a quick n dirty survey in a faculty seminar)

GPT-5.4 Pro very confidently generated a lot of wrong proofs today Maybe effect of high expectations, maybe statistically significant

The targeting of Ahmadinejad is... unorthodox. He was under house arrest, apparently a dissident. He's also the sort of figure you generally DON'T target in a decapitation strike- a potential factional leader supposed to have semi-moderate views on Israel.

BREAKING: Iranian drone hit the five-star Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, UAE. The 321-meter, 60-story tower stands on an artificial island.

What’s the US’s “fourth” city? New York, New Orleans, and New Braunfels are pretty clearly the top 3 but the 4th is more ambiguous. I feel like the main contenders are probably Newark, Newport News, or Miami but I might be missing one.