Larry Au

🔥 @ronnychieng at Harvard: “F*ck A.I. — the mission of your generation is to destroy it… shortcuts to skip to the end aren’t always good. The journey is the point of all this.”

A warning from the president of MIT: “the nation’s research enterprise is shrinking. Scientific funding is drying up. And the funds Congress recently allocated for science are not actually flowing” “At public and private universities across the country, high-impact science is being damaged and derailed. Speaking for my own institution, compared to this time last year, MIT has experienced a decline in campus research activity funded by federal awards of more than 20%.”

Our China at CUNY Initiative (CACI) Fellow, Amalia Torrecillas, reflects on the role of CACI in her teaching chinacuny.org/fellow-reflect…

The right to leave one's country is a basic human rights, one that sadly the Chinese govt has been increasingly violating whether we're talking about Uyghurs as a group or top AI talents bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Nothing will push top AI talent away faster than telling them they are not allowed to leave. The CCP just can't win people's hearts because, at its core, it is a control freak.

i had a student last year who did not know how to download a pdf from the course website and open it to read at a later time; thus he also did not know how to highlight and underline on said pdf. there's an actual crisis too few are willing to acknowledge, much less address.

This viral trend of satirical journals is highlighting the intense competition in Chinese academia go.nature.com/4dxWJ7f

The new issue of Daedalus, the open-access Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is chock full of good material on AI. w/@demishassabis @ylecun @alondra @pushmeet and so many others I wrote about the future of AI-facilitated medicine amacad.org/daedalus/ai-sc…

Science has always been built on collaborative efforts.

The NYT is hiring a China science reporter, to be based in Taipei or Seoul. Interesting job for anyone with science reporting/comms experience and Chinese literacy. job-boards.greenhouse.io/thenewyorktime…

Berkeley law has introduced a new, much stricter AI policy law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/upl…

As foreign journalists in China we all knew we were being tracked. But it still is a weird sensation to come across a test system for tracking foreign nationals with mugshots, passport info and other data on me and other China (former) China correspondents.

This is very interesting: a post-plagiarism conception of AI misuse that also prohibits its use for "conceptualising" and "outlining". The guiding principle – that "*thinking* remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)" – is surely right.

On the one-year anniversary of EMPIRE OF AI, I am so, so excited to announce The AI Resist List, a new project that documents examples of resistance to the AI empires around the world. airesistlist.org

Wow. Deeply troubling.

An MIT researcher spent four months watching what happens inside the skull of a student who writes with ChatGPT, and the result was so clean that almost nobody outside her lab has read the paper. Her name is Nataliya Kosmyna. She runs experiments at the MIT Media Lab. The study was released in 2025, and the finding is the kind of thing that should have rewritten every syllabus. The setup was simple. She recruited 54 people in Boston. Each one wore an EEG headset that read brain activity across 32 regions of the scalp. They wrote the same kind of essay, over and over again, for four months. One group used ChatGPT. One group used Google. One group used nothing but their own head. Then her team looked at the brain recordings. The students writing alone had the strongest neural connectivity. Memory, language, and attention networks were all firing together. The Google group came in second. The ChatGPT group came last, by a wide margin. Their brains had gone quiet. In a final session, she made the ChatGPT users write without the tool. Their brains stayed quiet. The under-engagement had become the new baseline. Then she asked them to quote a single line from the essay they had just written. Eighty percent of them could not do it. They had not written the essay. The essay had passed through them. Kosmyna calls it cognitive debt. Every shortcut you take with the model is a withdrawal from a part of your brain that was supposed to do the work. The shortcut feels free. It is not.

Saving and projecting this for my students next time I teach bc this TA said everything so fucking perfectly. How WOULD the students feel if I used AI to teach? It’s fundamentally about the disrespect and disregard for our labor (that they expect from us!) to ensure their success

Stop using ChatGPT. Consult a local grandma…text your friend gc w/ a weird name…type ur problems into Reddit dot com…go to the library…pay a psychic…the ancient sources of wisdom…

So I'm 36 years old and, you know, out of touch with what's going on at colleges, so maybe this is a dumb question, but did every school in the country lose their fucking minds lol. Why have all these universities baked AI into their graduation ceremonies? What fuck is going on?