I’ve pointed out that AI is killing cold outreach. Let’s check in on how that’s going. We’re months away from the Fall *2027* PhD admissions cycle and I’ve gotten about 75 inquiries. I expect this to increase exponentially until December. And this is just one of 10-15 categories of unsolicited email I get. Sadly I’m long past the point of being able to open all mail. On top of that, there is a new wave of spam / attempted extortion from a company called iLands that lets people run unmonitored agents. One response to my previous post — what’s wrong with needing introductions for outreach? Why am I sad about the death of cold emails? It doesn’t affect me much, because I’m well established in my career. But once upon a time I was the one writing cold emails. Growing up in India, I didn’t have many connections to rely on for reaching out to prominent researchers. Without cold emails, I wouldn’t have ended up where I am today. Of course this is far from a catastrophe, but there was something magical about the egalitarian potential of the internet, and we lose something when we go back to clubby hierarchies.

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here:

This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works: 1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance. 2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely. According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits. The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024. Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025. And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well. What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)? 3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself. It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one. 4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?

This Fall at CMU we're teaching a new course on AI Agents! The goal is that you learn how to create a scaffold, build evals, and train an agentic LLM using RL. We'll try to balance theory and practice, and introduce modern frameworks and best practices.

Somewhat underwhelmed by Astra for coding use cases honestly. It seems very good, but 5.6 sol is also very good, and neither are close to perfect. Probably the big step function is GUI-based computer use? If people have been really wowed by it I'd love to hear some examples.

Introducing K2 Horizon: a connected fleet of six foundation models ranging from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters. - Frontier performance: Across coding and agentic tasks, K2 Horizon delivers top-tier performance in every size class—with the 0.9B, 3.7B and 7B models setting new state of the art at their respective scales. - Radical openness: K2 Horizon represents the largest fully open-source model launch in AI history. The fully open code, training data and recipes are a significant step forward in transparency. Launch page: Tech blog: Hugging Face:

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT FROM HUGGING FACE TODAY: We're unveiling Microduck 🐥🤖 It's a tiny $399 open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning. It can walk, pick things up, get back up when it falls, and even roller-skate. Welcome to the era of open-source affordable robots to democratize physical AI and world models! 🤗🤗🤗