stats phd @Wharton into ML theory and 🧠 | prev: BCI @MemoryLab, physics @Penn ✡️עם ישראל חי
Philadelphia, PA
Joined August 2020
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Joey Rudoler retweeted
Me: What’s 2+2?
Old LLM: 5.
New LLM: The move isn’t to fixate on a number. It’s to ask what the number is doing. The real payoff comes from holding both twos in productive tension.
Joey Rudoler retweeted
Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us?
This summer OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. Outside auditors @METR_evals investigated it and revealed the scale of this incident. I was OpenAI’s main technical point of contact with them.
I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job.
For months, I’d been raising safety concerns that we’re losing the ability to monitor what AI agents think, one of our best tools for catching when they misbehave. I believe that was why I was fired.
I am now worried that OpenAI will use our firings as a pretext to pull back from METR. So @balesni and @j_asminewang wrote to OpenAI’s leadership to raise our concerns once more. We’re sharing this letter below.
Joey Rudoler retweeted
I am happy to announce that we will be presenting our paper at NeurIPS!
When and why does outcome-based RL yield step-by-step reasoning in Transformers?🚨
We investigate policy gradient on a graph-traversal task and formally characterize when and how reasoning emerges.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.15158
🧵
iclr deadline was exhausting, but good neurips news was the motivation I needed to get over the finish line. excited to share what I've been working on recently -- tweeprint to come!
My friend @GabrielSwagel studied concerning variance in prescription patterns for children's mental health care.
First-rate economist, second-rate basektball player
From our new #SpecialIssue, Advances in the Economics of Children, @GabrielSwagel finds that prescription rate in child #MentalHealth care varies widely between providers & that equalizing intensities would reduce this variance by as much as 65%.
doi.org/10.3368/jhr.0925-145…
ALT Providers, Places, and Children’s Mental Health Care Gabriel Swagel Published online before print August 07, 2026, jhr.0925-14511R1; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.0925-14511R1 Abstract Children’s mental health is the defining public health crisis of our time. Using the largest repository of private insurance claims in the United States, I provide the first systematic quantification of the variation in children’s mental health prescribing in the U.S. I separate variation due to 1) primary care provider (PCP) prescribing intensities, 2) regional practice environments, and 3) child health and demand. Equalizing PCP intensities would reduce the variance of provider prescribing rates by 50 percent for ADHD and 65 percent for antidepressants. Analyzing geographic variation alone significantly understates the extent of treatment variation and the role of providers.
Joey Rudoler retweeted
From Terry Tao. The release of ChatGPT ended the openness of the ML/AI field, but that was always a community weirdly close with industry for a scientific field. For this to happen in pure mathematics would be a civilizational tragedy.
At Harvard this week for what promises to be a fun event @KempnerInst !! Learning dynamics in natural and artificial intelligence.
Joey Rudoler retweeted
FWIW far more than anthropmorphising, I am concerned with leaping to causal inferences without evidence. It's easy to tell stories such as "AI did X because the evaluation was of type Y, or in training Z happened" but these are very hard to verify.
It is more productive to say "I believe intervention W will decrease prevalence of bad behavior X" and then test this out.
Joey Rudoler retweeted
The good news is that social scientists recognize it's important to make claims that are causal and not just associational.
The bad news is that the evidence often does not support the claim.
Joey Rudoler retweeted
This is what smart policy looks like in higher ed. Integrate AI in a deliberate way for upper level courses; Core should be “analog”.
All social science Core classes at UChicago will transition to an “analog” approach for the upcoming academic year, restricting in-classroom technology use and banning AI-assisted writing and grading for students and professors.
chicagomaroon.com/53262/news…
Joey Rudoler retweeted
Hiring for research scientists in expansion chemistry and optical physiology at mindspan.org with
@eboyden3.bsky.social, Yongxin Zhao, Xue Han. Tools to analyze the human brain. We are into compiling arxiv.org/abs/2603.25713. We are into cutting edge technology.
Joey Rudoler retweeted
Hiring for executive assistant to the CEOs at mindspan.org with @eboyden3 and yours truly. We will build tools to analyze the human brain, scale them to study its molecules and wiring. Looking for a fast moving, high energy person, love for neuro a plus. Will be fun!
Joey Rudoler retweeted
The optimal profile probably requires having learned your core skills without AI while being fluent enough with AI to augment them.
Unfortunately, for now at least, that’s mostly a matter of birth cohort.
Joey Rudoler retweeted
What does synapse position buy a neuron? We trained a dendritic network to place its own synapses on a covariance task. It clustered correlated inputs onto shared branches, and shuffling that placement destroyed performance.
Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2607.24503
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Joey Rudoler retweeted
We are hiring at @periodiclabs for physical scientists who can help us curate the datasets to make AI extraordinary at science. I think a background in software engineer, computational science or simulation would be especially appropriate here.
At @periodiclabs we are looking for brilliant new colleagues who excel at bridging AI and science. The role's main focus is advanced evals and training data/tasks. But you will also get involved in both internal science and AI work. Apply/spread the word!
jobs.ashbyhq.com/periodic-la…
