Ben Recht

Why they matter

Researcher with public evidence across AI research, Compute & infrastructure.

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8d ago
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Blog: https://argmin.substack.com/ Webpage: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/ The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us. (Princeton) https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691272443/the-irrational-decision

Articles & links

I know it's been lifetimes since they put this out, but what did you think of this press release that seems to have more details? www.anthropic.com/institute/re...

When AI builds itself anthropic.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 3 ↻ 0 ↩ 1 · 18 from the directory shared this · 14d ago

The full commentary from mathematicians asked to review the proof is thoughtful and worth a read: cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085...

cdn.openai.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • An internal OpenAI model produced a proof disproving Erdős's 1946 unit distance conjecture; the paper posted to OpenAI's CDN calls itself a human-verified version of the AI's work.
  • The AI's original construction beat Erdős's ceiling by only ε ~ 10^-38; Princeton's Will Sawin later pushed the exponent to roughly n^1.014.
  • Scott Aaronson says his former student Lijie Chen 'simply gave GPT the problem' and it returned a several-page argument that held up under human review.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 3 ↻ 0 ↩ 1 · 5 from the directory shared this · 129d ago

I don't understand how people can report on companies complaining about distillation and IP theft without mentioning these companies' entire tech stack depends on distillation and IP theft. It's an important detail!

nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 44 ↻ 2 ↩ 1 · 5 from the directory shared this · 63d ago

This is probably too mathy, but the first few sections might help?

What is the objective of reasoning with reinforcement learning? arxiv.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • A new arXiv note argues several RL algorithms for LLMs with binary rewards are stochastic gradient ascent on a monotone transform of one probability.
  • Rejection sampling optimizes the logarithm of that probability; the GRPO algorithm optimizes the arcsine of its square root.
  • The two-sentence abstract by Damek Davis and Benjamin Recht was submitted on October 15, 2025.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 9 ↻ 1 ↩ 1 · 27d ago

In _The Ideas Letter_, Leif Weatherby, Tyler Shoemaker, and I wrote about the creation of reality through pseudoscience, religion, and psychosis. Of course, the piece is mostly about AI.

Reify This theideasletter.org
View on Bluesky · ♥ 23 ↻ 6 ↩ 4 · 5 from the directory shared this · 107d ago

I hear you, but the families have been willing to share these chats with journalists to raise awareness. See this NYT story, for example. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 3 ↻ 0 ↩ 1 · 26d ago

Did you see this fun one in the FT about how AI proves Hayek wrong? www.ft.com/content/cd3f...

ft.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 9 ↻ 0 ↩ 3 · 28d ago

Recent commentary

Have to appreciate the audacity of Anthropic defending three successive model releases with diminishing quality by claiming it's both intentional and for our own good.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 30 ↻ 1 ↩ 3 · 109d ago

I'm disappointed that the heated fight between tech bros and medtwitter about midjourney ultrasound snake oil hasn't broken containment over here.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 14 ↻ 1 ↩ 4 · 98d ago

Isn't putting METR & Redwood Research in charge of investigating the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident like putting Irregular in charge of cybersecurity testing?

View on Bluesky · ♥ 12 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 31d ago

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