Douglas Gray retweeted
I’m a centrist in that I thought Obama’s Cheesecake Factory joke was funny and also I like Cheesecake Factory
Douglas Gray retweeted
It’s crazy that most conferences still have guidelines that prohibit reviewers from using AI in any way to review a paper.
Douglas Gray retweeted
Mike was my colleague at Berkeley, and he's been fairly skeptical of deep learning's trajectory for years. Most scientists are skeptics, and it can take a big shock to get someone to consider a possibility that goes against the anchoring effect coded in our DNA.
I too was somewhat of a skeptic until ~6 months ago, and people ask me all the time why I joined Anthropic.
It started in April, when a friend I've known for 20 yrs messaged me saying he'd be in the Bay Area in a week, and he suggested we meet up. I invited him to my house for dinner, and he told me he had just joined Anthropic. He said the models were becoming increasingly more capable, and he believed both that they'd soon be smarter than him and also that all intellectual work would be highly devalued in the near future, and lastly that society was not at all ready for what's coming.
I'd of course heard claims similar to this before, but not from a friend I'd known for this long, and who I trusted, at my dining room table. It was the initial shock needed to destabilize my own anchoring. Also, I've been fortunate to work with and/or mentor many smart people in my life (e.g. Fields medalists, a 4x Putnam Fellow, IOI first place winners, etc.), so I feel pretty calibrated in recognizing very smart people, and this was someone who is definitely very smart and with impressive such credentials. So, it was hard to ignore this friend saying the models would be smarter than even him in particular.
After that dinner, I decided to do an informal survey, calling and meeting up with a lot of my friends who now work on improving model capabilities at these frontier labs. They all agreed with that first friend. These were all people I'd known 10, 15, 20 years, who mentored me, or I mentored them, or we met professionally in academia. These are people I trust, and their beliefs on this topic were consistent.
I then spent a whole lot of time understanding the missions of different companies, and talking to current and former employees and people in leadership. I read Dario's (long) essays and watched videos on YouTube of company leaders being interviewed. Anthropic's stated mission "to ensure that the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI" felt like exactly the right guiding principle to handle such a society-disrupting technology, and everyone I spoke to at the company was very aligned with this mission. It's easily the most mission-focused place I've ever been at, and everyone takes the work extremely seriously and with a profound sense of responsibility.
And now here I am. And being on the inside, the pace of progress has surprised me more than I first imagined. The moment that pure mathematicians are in, to me, is just a microcosm of what I predict a much larger of society will be grappling with in the not too distant future, and I really hope our leaders and the general public internalize sooner than later just how significant a moment we're in.
Michael Jordan (the machine learning one): "Superintelligence is Science Fiction" 🔥🔥🔥
di.ens.fr/~fbach/MJordan_ITW…
Douglas Gray retweeted
Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are:
• Proprietary data
• Network effects
• A physical component
Douglas Gray retweeted
This is incredible
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model.
We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results.
github.com/openai/math
Douglas Gray retweeted
YC and dropout culture have convinced us the ideal founder is 22, straight out of school, but the data tells a different story.
Some interesting data:
- An MIT study of 2.7 million US founders found that the average founder was 47 when starting a company that later exited through an acquisition or IPO.
- The same study cited that the founders of the fastest-growing 0.1% of U.S. startups were 45 years old on average when they started their companies.
- A 50-year-old founder was approximately twice as likely as a 30-year-old founder to produce an acquisition or IPO.
- Founders with at least three years of relevant industry experience were twice as likely to build a top-0.1%-growth company as founders with none.
So it seems that experience is one of the strongest advantages a founder can have.
Two lessons here:
1. It's never too late to start
2. It might actually be TOO early to start; getting work experience is worth considering
Douglas Gray retweeted
I asked Opus 5.5 to explain camera focus by building an interactive lens lab
Here's what it came up with after 1 hour 26 minutes in one shot, $25.66 API cost
lens.lab.sael.net
Move the focus ring and you can see the glass elements shift the sharp plane through the scene
Douglas Gray retweeted
#ECCV2026 is just amazing! Around 6,000 to over 7,000 participants.
Submissions: 10,473 papers submitted.
Accepted Papers: 2,883 accepted papers. September 8–12, 2026. Malmö
Douglas Gray retweeted
Eliciting Self-Verification in Multimodal Reasoning Agents with Reinforcement Learning
Vishwas Sathish, Viresh Ranjan, Xinliang Zhu, Arnab Dhua, Douglas Gray
arxiv.org/abs/2609.08025 [𝚌𝚜.𝙰𝙸 𝚌𝚜.𝙲𝙻 𝚌𝚜.𝙲𝚅]
💬To appear in ECCV 2026
ALT Reasoning agents increasingly rely on external tools such as web search to answer complex queries. Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning algorithms such as GRPO have improved long-form reasoning in text-only language models, particularly for coding and mathematics. Reliable tool use in multimodal agents, however, remains challenging because models must interpret text and images while integrating noisy retrieved evidence, often under sparse outcome-level supervision without explicit verification signals. We present Self-Verification via Reinforcement Learning (SVRL), an RL-only finetuning framework that trains multimodal agents to verify and filter retrieved evidence within their own reasoning traces, reducing reliance on external verifiers at inference time. SVRL also introduces a search-aware penalty that discourages unnecessary tool calls and a query-diversity reward that encourages diverse, well-formed search queries, providing fine-grained feedback on when and what to search. Fine
Douglas Gray retweeted
This is a better way to visualize Columbus’ voyages than the traditional way (that shows him traveling through a modern map)..
It looks a lot crazier and more daring when you see it as a trip into the unknown.
Douglas Gray retweeted
I don't know if the Jeff Dean Facts list still exists internally to Google, but if so someone needs to add "Jeff Dean quit and Google's stock dropped by 180 billion dollars."
Impressive.
Douglas Gray retweeted
I think the fundamental disconnect here is that you wants politics to solve man's search for meaning and I want politics to deliver a prosperous, safe, free society in which everyone can go find meaning in something other than politics.
Douglas Gray retweeted
Before vibe coding became a thing, programming was already evolving in that direction. It already increasingly consisted of installing and configuring stuff other people wrote, without reading the source.
Douglas Gray retweeted
I’ve found this useful in my professional career, but I think it had a much more consequential meaning when it was written.
Douglas Gray retweeted
Soccer purist: Even if the guy is a millimeter offsides and it goes against the spirit of the rule it absolutely must be called.
Confused fan: Interesting. So when does the game end?
Soccer purist: Whenever the ref feels like ending it.
