Joe Bak-Coleman

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Directory member with public evidence across AI research.

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Research Scientist at the University of Washington based in Brooklyn. Also: SFI External Applied Fellow, Harvard BKC affiliate. Collective Behavior, Statistics, etc..

Articles & links

Anthropic pays like $400k for data scientists just to get ugly dynamite plots. www.anthropic.com/research/sel...

AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter anthropic.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Anthropic's Frontier Red Team ran Gemma4-26B-A4B distributed across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes (~$55 each) at about 0.39 tokens per second.
  • GLM-5.2 was the only open-weight model to achieve reliable full end-to-end replication, spreading to all 8 contained nodes in 4 of 5 trials.
  • Authors William Zhou and Daniel Freeman write that if small models improve at historical rates, they will match this replication capability by end of 2026.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 46 ↻ 4 ↩ 2 · 16 from the directory shared this · 5d ago

It’s amazing seeing @holdenthorp.bsky.social say the obvious part clearly. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org
View on Bluesky · ♥ 29 ↻ 8 ↩ 1 · 13 from the directory shared this · 93d ago

Tips for journalists covering "AI in space": -Ask about heat dissipation *at scale* -Ask "Doesn't the sun come down here too?" -Ask "y tho?" www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/t...

nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 80 ↻ 14 ↩ 6 · 5 from the directory shared this · 24d ago

Oh there’s like a pretty big body of literature that gets shunted to the banner of “critical Metascience” that questions all of the replication crisis narratives they undergird things like LLM reproducibility or predicting replicability. Stuff like this: arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

The Difference Between "Replicable" and "Not replicable" is not Itself Scientifically Replicable arxiv.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Under a benchmark model, small variability in replicability rates creates an irreducible variance floor that no amount of replication can eliminate.
  • Under an operational model, one binary verdict per experiment carries no information about between-experiment heterogeneity.
  • The authors reanalyse Many Labs 4 and conclude the replication crisis, if there is one, cannot be established by the methods used to declare it.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 3 ↻ 0 ↩ 1 · 3 from the directory shared this · 25d ago
↻ Joe Bak-Coleman reposted
Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com

Absolutely essential reading about the impact of vibe coding on open source and the practice of software development generally, by @samlearner.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/cec8...

ft.com View on Bluesky →
↻ Joe Bak-Coleman reposted
Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social

OpenAI’s faster Fourier transform is less a mathematical breakthrough and more a malicious exploit of mathematical traditions.

argmin.net View on Bluesky →

Here's Roose and Newton platforming cranks like Kokotajlo (author of the ai-2027 nonsense) on Hard Fork; But they're literally calling their show "machine gods" www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/p...

nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 1 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 12d ago

For example this report "Beyond P(doom)", which throws 1970s statistical thinking at Yud's existential risk and summarizes it neatly. You wind up with this doozy of a recommendation; but note that it is all couched in LessWrong thinking. cset.georgetown.edu/publication/...

Beyond P(doom) for AI Risk: Quantifying Uncertainty Without Probability | Center for Security and Emerging Technology Georgetown AI cset.georgetown.edu
View on Bluesky · ♥ 4 ↻ 0 ↩ 2 · 2 from the directory shared this · 25d ago

Newton and Roose, who have been pushing wacky AGI shit, have apparently been chatting with Tarbell and ultimately got 480K to start their own podcast. Tarbell, notably, is funded by a who's who of Effective Altruists worried about AI-God. www.semafor.com/article/10/0...

Exclusive: AI nonprofit will spend $10 million on journalism semafor.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Tarbell Center for AI Journalism will spend $10 million by the end of 2027 funding AI reporting at mainstream and independent newsrooms.
  • The first grants go to NPR: $480,000 for Machine Gods, Kevin Roose and Casey Newton's new video podcast, and $250,000 for the Power and Influence desk.
  • The fund, backed by AI-safety-aligned Coefficient Giving, will award grants of $50,000 to $500,000, with some potentially reaching the multimillions.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 33 ↻ 8 ↩ 6 · 2 from the directory shared this · 13d ago

Recent commentary

I don’t get the “I’m so flooded with peer reviews I simply must use AI” take. Just uhh turn them down? Click decline.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 119 ↻ 13 ↩ 12 · 46d ago

I got a *remarkably quick* rejection email from a tenure track job that I applied to. Rejections are part of the process! However, if you’re going to screen candidates with ai, please don’t ask for more than a cv and let us know! It’s a lot of time learning about your dept, writing and tailoring.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 101 ↻ 23 ↩ 5 · 29d ago

I’ll write a longer blog post about it soon, but I’ll believe OpenAI agents have formed a hacking collective and it’s not just a PR stunt when they ransomware a Swiss bank, not another AI outfit about to be acquired by a hardware providider; when Interpol not MIRI investigates.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 85 ↻ 24 ↩ 1 · 41d ago

Effective altruism is unequivocally finding a doomsday disinformation campaign. As scientists who serve the public, it’s our job to call bullshit on our colleagues and journalists who propagate unfounded claims that AI doomsday is upon us, even couched as “boiling the frog slow”.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 80 ↻ 12 ↩ 2 · 6d ago

Had my first email arising from what seems to be an LLM-guided spite-check of my published code. Anyone else experienced this yet? I'm pulling the repo and verifying the possible error, will happily correct if need be but this seems like a great way to DDoS scientists. #metascience #AcademicSky

View on Bluesky · ♥ 55 ↻ 6 ↩ 10 · 21d ago

Because it keeps popping up in AI articles, “Cure for cancer” is a pretty good indicator that someone knows fuck all about biology. At minimum both should be plural!

View on Bluesky · ♥ 48 ↻ 12 ↩ 2 · 14d ago

One thing I'm noticing looking at AI funding is that there is a class of researcher who relies almost solely on industry funding and *doesn't* report it anywhere; rarely having a CV. You just find it in like university announcements.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 47 ↻ 8 ↩ 4 · 3d ago

One of the more common responses I got yesterday was the argument from philosophy of mind that roughly asserts simpler organisms than ourselves must also have minds (lest we be human chauvinists); perhaps even groups of organisms therefore LLMs must have minds too. It's a rhetorical switcheroo tho.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 37 ↻ 6 ↩ 3 · 27d ago

It's wild to me that journalists at storied institutions can't smell an IPO pump and instead wind up sanity-laundering the weird AI Death cult.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 33 ↻ 7 ↩ 3 · 32d ago

The group that got all of that coverage for investigating the Hugging Face attack (METR) wrote a paper where "evidence" consisted of "An Anthropic co-founder said so"

View on Bluesky · ♥ 24 ↻ 5 ↩ 4 · 8d ago

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