Shtetl-Optimized

As I announced on this blog a couple weeks ago, I’m teaching a new course this semester at UT Austin, entitled AI Alignment Theory.

“The Topic” being, of course, the Mathocalypse, except sometimes with AI alignment and even quantum computing and complexity theory and other stuff thrown in.

… then they came for Navier–Stokes and I said nothing because I never worked on Navier–Stokes.

This semester, I’ve been teaching a brand-new course, entitled CS395T AI Alignment Theory.

Or click here if the above doesn’t work.

Scott’s foreword: I’m extremely grateful to my brilliant colleagues, Pravesh Kothari, Raghu Meka, and Prasad Raghavendra, for sharing the guest post below about how theoretical computer science (and in particlar, the STOC/FOCS/SODA conferences) should evo…

Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, many of us would say things like: Look, the part of the st…

Note: Of course I’ve been glued all week to the dramatic developments in AI.

I woke up yesterday with the following thoughts, which are probably either obvious or dumb.

So yeah, Anthropic has announced that it’s now watermarking the outputs of Claude, using a scheme based on Google’s SynthID, which is in turn based on the Gumbel Softmax scheme that I proposed at OpenAI back in 2022—as far as I know, the first LLM waterma…

What’s about the only thing more badass than a 17-year-old winning a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI)?

Friend-of-the-blog (well, mainly just friend) Adi Akavia has asked me to publicize that she’s helping to organize an exciting CS conference called Mind-IL at Tel Aviv University on October 26, in memory of the Israeli-American Turing Award winner Michael…

Whatever you’ve been writing to me to ask if I’m aware of: yeah, I’m aware of it.

A week ago, a philosopher named Amit Hagar put out a preprint entitled The NISQ Trap: Eight Years of Demonstrations the Hardware was Built to Lose.

Here at the National Academy of Sciences, it seems that my first job is to serve on the selection committee for the prestigious Michael and Sheila Held Prize in combinatorial and discrete optimization and related areas.

As I’ve written before, these past couple years I’ve often felt like the last remaining person in either quantum computing or AI who lacked a stake in some startup company whose valuation is right now shooting into interstellar space.

I’m at the New Jersey shore with family and friends, where we’ve spent this Fourth of July eating hot dogs, playing miniature golf, and wading into the ocean that my great-grandparents crossed to escape calamities they knew about and much greater calamiti…

Scott’s foreword: Cynthia Dwork is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, and a pioneer in the fields of differential privacy and algorithmic fairness.