Head of Sports Analytics @ The Crowd's Line. Building betting models via crowd-sourcing & ML/AI. Former quant futures PM. MIT: physics & math. From rural Texas.

New York, USA
Joined September 2013
“Crowds Line AI has won the White Swan Predicts NEXT Gen Traders live final. The team receives a $3m trading allocation from White Swan, and has been offered a further $3m of investment from Neal Berger’s Eagle’s View Asset Management, pending due diligence.”
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Justin Nelson retweeted
I'm thrilled to announce that PitPro has deployed our first production unit to Kal Tire in Calgary! In robotics demos are easy but deployments are hard. Getting our robot onto the floor of a Kal Tire store is a defining moment for us and proof ready for the real world.
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Our new AI model, SparksMatter, discovered CaMg₂Si₂ - a Ca-filled Mg-Si Zintl silicide - as a thermoelectric built only from stable, non-toxic, earth-abundant elements. Thermoelectrics are solid-state materials that convert heat directly into electricity (and electricity into cooling) with no moving parts, which makes them a key technology for harvesting the vast amounts of waste heat from engines, industry and electronics, and even fusion - but today's best ones rely on scarce or toxic elements like tellurium, lead and bismuth. This is why an earth-abundant, non-toxic candidate matters. Our model's physical reasoning to come up with the design: Mg₂Si is a known earth-abundant thermoelectric but conducts heat too well; a heavy, weakly bound Ca cation in the Mg-Si framework should scatter phonons while keeping a moderate band gap. It generated 100 Ca-Mg-Si crystals with MatterGen, kept the six within 0.05 eV/atom of the convex hull (via MatterSim), and predicted band gaps of 0.44-0.57 eV and bulk moduli of 53-54 GPa (CGCNN). Follow-up lattice dynamics found three CaMg₂Si₂ polymorphs dynamically stable, with lattice thermal conductivity ≈6 W m⁻¹ K⁻¹ at 300 K and ≈2 at 1000 K. The AI proposed a chemical hypothesis first, then developed and applied a separate generative/physics pipeline to test it, and six surviving structures came back with that hypothesized composition. The video replays the reasoning process. New paper out with Alireza Ghafarollahi in npj Computational Materials: SparksMatter, an AI that runs the full in-silico inorganic materials discovery cycle - ideation, planning, computational experimentation, critique and reporting - from a single plain-language query. Why this matters: conventional ML models for materials are typically single-shot predictors or generators. They can predict a property or propose a structure, but they do not organize the next scientific step. Discovery, instead, works as a loop: hypothesize, test, critique, revise. The key advance here is a deep reasoning layer that incorporates physics to decide which scientific tool to use, how to interpret the result, and what to change as next step. How it works: SparksMatter spawns a suite of AI agents - scientists, planners, coders, reviewers and critics - that write and execute code against materials tools: Materials Project retrieval; MatterGen for generative crystal design conditioned on chemistry, band gap or bulk modulus; MatterSim for relaxation and convex-hull stability; CGCNN for property prediction. Adversarial agents check each phase, the system revises its ideas, plans and code from execution results, documents its own limitations, and delivers a scientific report with a validation roadmap spanning DFT, phonons, transport, synthesis and characterization. Two more discovery tasks SparksMatter ran autonomously: 1⃣Soft inorganic semiconductors: generated 112 structures conditioned on low stiffness and narrowed them to 59 candidates absent from the Materials Project after toxicity, stability, electronic, mechanical and database screening - bulk moduli 11-24 GPa, band gaps 0.4-3.9 eV. 2⃣Lead-free perovskites: filtered 154,879 Materials Project entries to 162 Pb-free ABO₃ candidates meeting structural, toxicity, stability and band-gap criteria, including LaAlO₃, BaZrO₃, SrSnO₃, CaTiO₃ and SrTiO₃. Benchmark: the same three tasks were given to frontier reasoning models acting as expert materials scientists with web browsing but without the generation and prediction tools. A blinded LLM evaluator scored every response ten times on relevance, scientific soundness, novelty, and depth and rigor. SparksMatter scored highest in aggregate, with its strongest advantages in novelty and depth & rigor. Its main limitation was scientific soundness because much of the core screening still relied on surrogate models rather than direct first-principles or experimental validation - a gap the system identified, documented, and mapped out how to close. Takeaway: putting generative models, executable code and physics-based simulators inside the reasoning loop lets an AI propose structures outside existing databases, test them, reject weak candidates, and say what evidence is still missing.
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Justin Nelson retweeted
WHY SHIT NOT WORKING: EPISODE 11
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NBA Finals Game 3 Recap 📈 Model was wildly accurate last night 🔥 Overall: 24-10 (71%) 🎯 Average Odds: +164 🔥 Unders: 17-2 (89%) 🎯 Average Odds: +120 Avg Profit: +3.4 units 💰 ROI: +96% 1 of the 10 losses? Haliburton triple double @ +2100. Fell 1 board short!
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Here’s the model’s performance by month since going live last season ⬇️ After a disappointing April (+7.4U), we rallied for our 2nd best month of the season in May (+59.1U) 📈 Model’s been consistently good at predicting assist props throughout. +172 units combined L2 seasons!
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May 2025 NBA Model Recap 🗓️ Overall, we gained +59.1 units 📈 Most of that 💵 came in Round 2. Conference finals proved challenging Top 3 markets by PnL: 🥇Assists (+15.3u) 🥈Points (+14.7u) 🥉Pts+Ast (+13.8u) For the year, we’re now up +240 units More details in thread 🧵⬇️
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Justin Nelson retweeted
This paper shows LLMs internally break down composite tasks. They process components sequentially across layers. Methods 🔧: → Layer-from context-masking selectively blocks in-context example access from a specific layer onward. → This technique reveals sequential subtask learning points via an "X-shape" accuracy pattern across layers. → Cross-task patching injects activations from composite tasks into zero-shot subtask prompts. → It demonstrates composite task processing generates distinct, transferable subtask vectors, averaging 0.66 strength in Llama-3.1-8B. 📌 Layer-wise task execution enables precise intervention points. 📌 Task vectors offer a handle for steering learned behaviors. 📌 Internal processing mirrors explicit reasoning steps without outputting them. ---------------------------- Paper - arxiv. org/abs/2505.14530v1 Paper Title: "Internal Chain-of-Thought: Empirical Evidence for Layer-wise Subtask Scheduling in LLMs"
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Sunday NBA Model Recap 🔥 Terrifyingly accurate… again! 🎯 Best wins: ✅ Wallace 5+ Assists (+2090) ✅ Wiggins 3+ Assists (+1440) ✅ Wiggins 15+ PRA (+695) ✅ Braun Under 0.5 Blocks (+138) Avg Profit: +10.6 units 📈 ROI: +108% 💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰
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Wednesday NBA Recap 🔥 Top 20 Picks: 19-1 (95%)‼️ Average Odds? +125😏 Best Wins💰 ✅ Podz 25+ PA (+1200) ✅ McBride 3+ Assists (+671) ✅ Butler UNDER Everything (+3.1U) Avg Profit: +14.6 units 📈 ROI: +96% 💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰 Next Stop 📲 thecrowdsline.ai/dashboard/n…
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Justin Nelson retweeted
Absolutely crushing it 👏
Featured Pick of the Day: Podz O3.5 Assists (+119) Also available at +100 on FanDuel, BetMGM, and Caesars This line is 12-3 in Podz's last 15 games without Steph (going back to last year). No Steph, ~hopefully~ no problem! Full NBA forecast: thecrowdsline.ai/dashboard/n… #nbaplayoffs #thecrowdslineai
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Justin Nelson retweeted
If you aren't following @theCrowdsLineAI you're missing out on free and easy 1st half winners like this Also hit the alt for +255!! 👏
Today's Pick of the Day: Mikal Bridges O 2.5 Ast! This bet is available at +100 on DraftKings and BallyBet and -102 on FanDuel 💰 Our model has been HOT with Bridges – he's our 3rd best performing player on the season! Let's see if he can get it done for us in Game 1 at the Garden 🍀 Full NBA forecast: thecrowdsline.ai/dashboard/n… #NBAPlayoffs #TheCrowdsLineAI
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Ready to have your mind blown?🤯 See the model’s win percentage by odds range this NBA season: 💎 Sample size: 34,172 total picks 💎 Profitability: Everywhere✅ Seriously — If 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘭 on the street can beat these results across 34K+ picks — let us know‼️
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Justin Nelson retweeted
As we all know by now, reasoning models often generate longer responses, which raises compute costs. Now, this new paper (arxiv.org/abs/2504.05185) shows that this behavior comes from the RL training process, not from an actual need for long answers for better accuracy. The RL loss tends to favor longer responses when the model gets negative rewards, which I think explains the "aha" moments and longer chains of thought that arise from pure RL training. I.e., if the model gets a negative reward (i.e., the answer is wrong), the math behind PPO causes the average per-token loss becomes smaller when the response is longer. So, the model is indirectly encouraged to make its responses longer. This is true even if those extra tokens don't actually help solve the problem. What does the response length have to do with the loss? When the reward is negative, longer responses can dilute the penalty per individual token, which results in lower (i.e., better) loss values (even though the model is still getting the answer wrong). So the model "learns" that longer responses reduce the punishment, even though they are not helping correctness. In addition, the researchers show that a second round of RL (using just a few problems that are sometimes solvable) can shorten responses while preserving or even improving accuracy. This has big implications for deployment efficiency.
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Sunday Recap 🔥 Shook the books’ pockets.. again! 🤑 4th straight day, we earned: 💰 6+ units of profit 📈 20%+ ROI Top 30 Picks went 19-11 (63%) 🔮 Top Returning Bet: ✅ Steven Adams 10+ Boards (+800) Caps off our best week of the year Next stop 📲 thecrowdsline.ai/dashboard/n…
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Monday Model Recap 🔥 Bane stole the show! ✅ Triple Double (+4083) ✅ Double Double (+597) ✅ 10+ Assists (+973) Honorable mention… ✅ Zach Edey to sink a Three (+342) Average PnL +4.1% 📈 ROI +30% Next stop 📲 thecrowdsline.ai/dashboard/n…
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Justin Nelson retweeted
This is interesting as a first large diffusion-based LLM. Most of the LLMs you've been seeing are ~clones as far as the core modeling approach goes. They're all trained "autoregressively", i.e. predicting tokens from left to right. Diffusion is different - it doesn't go left to right, but all at once. You start with noise and gradually denoise into a token stream. Most of the image / video generation AI tools actually work this way and use Diffusion, not Autoregression. It's only text (and sometimes audio!) that have resisted. So it's been a bit of a mystery to me and many others why, for some reason, text prefers Autoregression, but images/videos prefer Diffusion. This turns out to be a fairly deep rabbit hole that has to do with the distribution of information and noise and our own perception of them, in these domains. If you look close enough, a lot of interesting connections emerge between the two as well. All that to say that this model has the potential to be different, and possibly showcase new, unique psychology, or new strengths and weaknesses. I encourage people to try it out!
We are excited to introduce Mercury, the first commercial-grade diffusion large language model (dLLM)! dLLMs push the frontier of intelligence and speed with parallel, coarse-to-fine text generation.
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Our paper "Function-Space Learning Rates" is on arXiv! We give an efficient way to estimate the magnitude of changes to NN outputs caused by a particular weight update. We analyse optimiser dynamics in function space, and enable hyperparameter transfer with our scheme FLeRM! 🧵👇
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