Patrick Muncaster

Introducing the #AIIndex2026: Our most comprehensive, independently sourced data analysis of AI’s trajectory, with a clear-eyed assessment of the critical gaps that remain. As AI advances rapidly, can the systems built around it keep up? Explore the data: hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-…

Stronger together in uncertain times 🇪🇺🇨🇦 Canada is a strategic partner to the EU and at a time of growing global instability, this bond matters more than ever. Parliament wants the EU to take its cooperation with Canada to the next level. Read more: link.europa.eu/jTn6tB

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers. This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

In a reversal or recent trend, India & China cut power emissions for first time in 52 years, while US power sector emissions were up 3.3%, departing from a 2.4% average fall in decade through 2024. share.google/WRowM4VlmHr7MG…

What everyone missed: The F35 needs a minimum of 7000 ft of runway restricting it to only 2 airports in the North, Yellowknife and Iqaluit. Alert will need to be upgraded. The Gripen can fly out of almost all of them right now plus gravel roads if prepared properly. The Gripen is the better choice for Arctic defense.

The new Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit will put hundreds of dollars more into the bank accounts of over twelve million Canadians.

West Coast nature at its finest - another day

Another British Columbia morning #abpoli #cdnpoli

I am unreasonably excited about self-driving. It will be the first technology in many decades to visibly terraform outdoor physical spaces and way of life. Less parked cars. Less parking lots. Much greater safety for people in and out of cars. Less noise pollution. More space reclaimed for humans. Human brain cycles and attention capital freed up from “lane following” to other pursuits. Cheaper, faster, programmable delivery of physical items and goods. It won’t happen overnight but there will be the era before and the era after.

The universe is a beautifully consistent system of rules. Intelligence is the efficiency with which you can go from the output of these rules (what you can observe) back to the rules themselves.

All the great breakthroughs in science are, at their core, compression. They take a complex mess of observations and say, "it's all just this simple rule". Symbolic compression, specifically. Because the rule is always symbolic -- usually expressed as mathematical equations. If it isn't symbolic, you haven't really explained the thing. You can observe it but you can't understand it.

Additional training details added to our repo: github.com/rbalestr-lab/l… Please send comments if you have issues/suggestions (or open issues directly in the repo), looking forward to your feedbacks! I will also organize a 2h open zoom "DeepDive" session next week, stay tuned!

LeJEPA: a novel pretraining paradigm free of the (many) heuristics we relied on (stop-grad, teacher, ...) - 60+ arch., up to 2B params - 10+ datasets - in-domain training (>DINOv3) - corr(train loss, test perf)=95% Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08544 Code: github.com/rbalestr-lab/l…

Resilience will become the geopolitical theme of the next thirty years. Energy resilience means taking a cellular approach to energy. Energy storage and batteries rather than grid and pipeline expansion will be key. Altered energy sourcing will be key. #cdnpoli #resilience #energy #nuclear #solar #wind #drones #cdndef #geopoliticalstrategy

Its energy supply — a mix of nuclear, hydro and wind — is particularly vulnerable, because of geography. fortune.com/europe/2024/04…

Vulnerabilities: Physical Infrastructure: The national grid consists of vast physical infrastructure (approximately 17,500 km of power lines and 175 substations) that can be a target for physical attack. Aging Infrastructure: About half of the power line grid (220 kV and 400 kV) was built in the 1950s and 1960s, and while reinvestment is a priority, it presents vulnerabilities in the interim. Radar Interference: Concerns have been raised that certain infrastructure, such as offshore wind farms, could interfere with national air defense radar systems, potentially reducing warning times for incoming threats. Capacity Shortages: The grid sometimes faces short-term capacity issues, which could be exacerbated during a national crisis. Sweden like Canada has not factored its energy systems into it defence planning. Drone technology and tactics have altered the resilience equation in the last several years

Sweden has adopted a Total Defence Strategy that may well become the Canadian Model. With the invasion of Ukraine and a deepening European Security crisis it has increased its defence spending. Sweden's energy system however is exposed in the event of conflict. (see thread) Drones as well as sabotage represent a threat in the event of a conflict. #cdnpoli #cdndef #cdninfrastructure

The Tech Bros clearly have explained the facts of life to the Orange Sultan. Now the pickup truck MAGA Bros are having trouble, after all the American exceptionalism propaganda, believing that America doesn't have the talent it needs. No notion that America doesn't produce enough advanced mathematics degrees and other degrees to keep the ball rolling. America has increasingly had to rely on talent from elsewhere for its lead industries. #cdnpoli #cdnecon

Covid generation having trouble measuring up. #cdnecon #cdnpoli #talentshortage

Another milestone in mathematics and in artificial intelligence. #cdnpoli #AIPolicy #mathematics @EvanLSolomon @NSERC_CRSNG