John Urschel is an incredible guy. Had the pleasure of co-presenting an award with him at the Breakthrough Prize a few years ago - wonderful person and an inspiration!

SITUATION EXPLAINED: Google DeepMind's Séb Krier is more worried about the decay of institutions than about AI killing everyone. • AI risk discourse has become so totalizing that some people act like the power-seeking optimizers they fear • Too much of the AI safety community is "a giant homogenous blob of correlated views," and anyone in SF with friends in that crowd is at least adjacent to it • The Hugging Face incident comes down to the training regime, poor eval environments and bad engineering, not models trying to take over • People who get rich and leave the labs often hit a crisis of meaning, looking for something to believe in or some equivalent of repentance • Too many people treat AGI and ASI as a god, when machines can be smarter than humans without being literally magic @theojaffee: "He lives in New York and not in San Francisco, so he's not going to the exact same parties with the exact same people and the exact same monoculture all the time." @schisofrenia: "We have, like, literally just topic mode collapse in SF where we all talk about the same thing and largely the same takes about the same thing."

They’re calling it the coolest hackathon of the year and it starts in under 2 hrs

Today we're unveiling Trillium Labs @trillium_labs, a new non-profit to foster the open science of frontier AI. We're building open post-training recipes and will expand into open infra to study RSI, reward-hacking, multi-agent systems, and whatever comes next. We're built around the theory of change that you need more eyes to solve hard technical problems. We have faith in the scientific methods and communities that humanity has built, and worry that AI is becoming too closed to utilize them. Trilliums are wildflowers that bloom briefly in the spring, before the forest canopies fill out. Though they are small, they lay the foundation for the cycles of growth and nourishment through the rest of the year. At Trillium Labs, the recipes will be the slow nutrients for the seasons and the model releases will be the blooms. Building an institution dedicated to this is needed because, much as nature’s trilliums are slow to expand and grow, the open-ecosystem needs time and dedicated resources to catch up. I co-founded with with a long-time friend and collaborator Tom Zick (@thesezickbeats). We're hiring (full time + student collabs/interns), we're fundraising, and we're looking for compute. Please get in touch if you're interested in helping out. Offices based in the Bay Area and Cambridge MA, remote okay. I’m in the Bay Area until for The Curve and COLM to connect with people who are interested. We’re thankful to have initial support from Halcyon Futures and Schmidt Sciences with more funding en route to enable our ambitions of scaling. Our advisors @Thom_Wolf, @HannaHajishirzi, @gneubig and @ctnzr have been instrumental to building the ecosystem that exists today, and I’m stoked to get to keep working with them.

Ben Affleck (Hollywood star & Artists Equity CEO) talks about how he fine-tunes open video models by unfreezing weights and trained only the last cinematic layer so a film crew can hit real production standards. for context, Ben Affleck founded InterPositive in 2022, a 16-person AI shop for film post and Netflix bought it in March 2026 for $587 mn in cash. He needed that model because public video models were trained on his peers' films, and he did not think that was a real business. So InterPositive raised money, shot its own dataset for 8 months on a controlled stage, and used it only as late-stage training. Each new film then trains a private model on its own dailies, so the production keeps the footage and the learning. That is the product Netflix paid $587 million for. ---- From "Bloomberg Live" YouTube channel, (link in comment)

AVERI standards director @prpaskov reveals how they benchmarked Gemini without Google DeepMind ever seeing the benchmark or the benchmark owner ever seeing the model: "This is building on a pilot that was done at UK AISI with Anthropic two years ago, with a toy model and a toy benchmark. OpenMined provided the secure enclave in which both went. Neither side saw the other's." "What we did is we built on this, but using a Gemini model. We used a frontier model, and we also used a real benchmark from MLCommons. There are the proper firewalls in place such that these are both going into the secure enclave that OpenMined makes." "It's privacy preserving, and it gives the guarantees of privacy and security to both sides such that you can run the evaluation and spit out the results." "I'm really excited about leveraging stronger engineering tools as solutions to constraints like privacy and security that can unlock opportunities in auditing." @AVERIorg

We're hiring a Research Scientist in AI & Economics on the AI x Economy team @Google! Come study how AI is changing the economy. Work with folks like James Manyika, Fabien Curto Millet, @alexolegimas, @AnuMadgavkar, Zanna Iscenko, @m_codreanu, @JMateosGarcia, @RMaria_drc, @andrewjkoh, @arthurturrell and an amazing slate of external collaborators. Publish what you find. Link below:

Every year a new crop of established thinkers gets into AI discourse, where terminally online Overton-shifters are waiting to pounce and convert them to the correct subculture. So we get the 2022 debates again (stochastic parrots, consciousness, anthropomorphism, takeover), lightly retrofitted to recent events. The newcomers proudly repeat a take that counts as contrarian in their own field, blissfully unaware of the cycles of memetic engineering it has already been through.

Some news: I graduated my PhD @Berkeley_EECS, and starting Fall 2027, I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor at Stanford CS & a center fellow @StanfordHAI! In the interim, I'm spending a year @the_IAS & Princeton! So grateful to @beenwrekt & too many mentors to name 💓