David Pfau
So far I have not found the science, but the numbers keep on circling me.
Views my own, unfortunately.
- Worth noting that the entire plot of 2001: A Space Odyssey was driven by an AI going insane trying to satisfy logically contradictory instructions from its creators.
- Reposted by David Pfauread this please www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/o...
- You might as well set national policy with a Ouija board or tarot cards.
- Reposted by David Pfausome interesting historical context re: stories of "chatGPT-induced psychosis" is that when the radio and telephone were invented, there were similar reactions — some people believed they could tune their radio to the frequencies of heaven or received instructions from the dead via the telephone
- The idea of "AI alignment" grew out of a community that thought you could solve morals like it was a CS problem set. Nice to see a more nuanced take.
- Announcing our latest arxiv paper: Societal and technological progress as sewing an ever-growing, ever-changing, patchy, and polychrome quilt arxiv.org/abs/2505.05197 We argue for a view of AI safety centered on preventing disagreement from spiraling into conflict.
- Also extremely telling that Starmer, who somehow has a bizarrely good relationship with Trump, has enjoyed no bump in the polls whatsoever.
- Reposted by David PfauOne of grants frozen at Cornell: $6.7M (4 yrs) to develop heart pumps for babies born w/ heart defects. It took decades of work to get to point of prepping device for in-human clinical trials. No private company could do this. The cruelty of the Trump administration is heartbreaking. So to speak.
- An enormous amount of society's ills can be traced to an inability to properly understand the magnitude of things.
- There was an entire subplot in Pynchon's Against the Day about this.
- Reposted by David Pfau🚨 New #ICML2025 paper! "Bongard in Wonderland: Visual Puzzles that Still Make AI Go Mad?" We test Vision-Language Models on classic visual puzzles—and even simple concepts like “spiral direction” or “left vs. right” trip them up. Big gap to human reasoning remains. 📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19546
- My latest paper got way less engagement on here than on the other site. Real talk: I think this place has become too much of an echo chamber, and done too much to drive away communities that might hate Elon but not align 100% with the orthodoxy.
- Alternate history where the NHS was created by Tories instead of Labour but it's called the Royal Health Service.
- Reposted by David Pfau[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by David PfauYou’re telling me that right wing voters that Labour was trying to appeal to voted for a right wing party anyway and left wing voters decided not to vote for Labour because they’re too right wing now? Who could have possibly predicted this.
- New paper accepted to ICML! We present a novel policy optimization algorithm for continuous control with a simple closed form which generalizes DDPG, SAC etc. to generic stochastic policies: Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO).
- The United States is hurtling towards autocracy and can no longer be considered a safe country for international scientists to visit, which is why we need to host ML conferences in robust democracies like Rwanda and Singapore.
- Goodhart's law rules everything around me.
- This is also basically how the Magna Carta accidentally created a universal right to due process.
- Trump winding the clock back to 1890, right down to the Mellons funding basic cultural institutions that should be provided by the state.
- *Punches guy in the face* Wow, chill out, you've really got "guy who punched you in the face" derangement syndrome.
- I love that we make up these fake generational names that have no basis in anything except when a once-in-a-century shock comes along that *actually* marks a sharp dividing line between cohorts we're just like "uhhh yeah it's older Gen Z and younger Gen Z"
- Reposted by David PfauPhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081
- Feels like 48 hours ago the consensus was Kash Patel is just an incompetent and corrupt buffoon, rather than a dangerous hatchet man who will weaponize the FBI, and now they're fucking arresting judges.
- The FBI has *ARRESTED* a sitting judge in Milwaukee, over allegations it obstructed immigration enforcement. abcnews.go.com/US/judge-han...
- Fantastic work from Andres Perez Fadon and our other long-time collaborators at Imperial showing that "Wigner molecules" basically don't exist (at least not as they are commonly understood) published in the Journal of Chemical Physics! pubs.aip.org/aip/jcp/arti...
