Over my career, I've served on 53 Ph.D. dissertation committees. Five of the students have been named 'Michael'. There was also a 'Mykel' and a 'Michail'. Homophily, you've gone too far.

Speaker at a talk just said that researchers who don't engage with the current work on large scale neural models will be dinosaurs. I'm wondering if I get to pick which kind of dinosaur before I have to decide.

Kinda cool... I haven't seen the book in the wild yet, but apparently it's even on display in some places!

A glowing review of my book (The MIT Press @mitpress.bsky.social) from one of my science communication heroes! (I went to one of Steven Strogatz 's book events on the notion of infinity and he encouraged me to write a book, and I did!)

I'm confused by this 23-and-me health survey question:

During the last month, how often ... Has your memory been as good as it usually is? (A) Never, (B) Some of the time, (C), About half the time, (D) Most of the time, (E) Always.

Isn't it usually as good as it usually is?

Airline installs chatbot. Customer gets bad information from it. Customer asks for refund. Airline says 'the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions' (!). Court says no. (Whew.) Airline makes refund and turns off chatbot. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

Discussion of 'deceptive' chatbots with Jennifer Strong SHIFT : podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shi… .

A short Q&A on AI for NSF. youtube.com/watch?v=HcZ6bq…

Dave and I interviewed Rich Sutton! computingup.com/rich-sutton-br…

Good news: AI Chatbots haven't increased cheating in HS, yay! Bad news: Maybe that's because 70% of students were already cheating... uh oh.
nytimes.com/2023/12/13/tec…

Interview from my friends at GT about my book.

That's a novel compliment. I'll take it. :-)

Miguel Morales Joshua Achiam ⚗️ David A. Joyner @[email protected] Charles Isbell Michael Littman An increasingly rare and valuable skill to have is going to be the ability to write unlike a GPT. Said another way, if your writing looks like it could be written by GPT its gonna be less valuable. For example, there is no way 'Code to Joy' was written by GPT

I believe I’ve discovered a brilliant way to chill wine: Add cold water to it. But I may just be diluting myself.

Stanford's Fei-Fei Li on AI and the central role of academic research in its future...
theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

I'm looking forward to Fibonacci minute tomorrow morning: 11/23, 5th day of the month, 8:13am.

When I submit recommendations, how am I supposed to answer questions like 'In what capacity do you know the applicant?'? In my capacity? Or the applicant's capacity? I feel like this could be asked more clearly...

Shepherd.com gave me the chance to make some book recommendations. These are some thematically related books that had a big impact on me.