Unfortunately, Hinton is wrong. Open sourcing is better than only a handful of corporate companies owning them.

I don’t think everyone has comprehended the massive disruption and distortion that is going to happen in the Gen AI market due to Llama3. Moats will be destroyed and investments will go to zero.

Just like everything in Gen AI, this will all happen fast.

I’m extremely proud of my student Megh Thakkar who has been awarded the Antidote scholarship for NLP! I received the Antidote scholarship during my phd at DIRO UMontréal and MilaQuebec and very happy to see my student joining the list of recipients! 😃

It's been quite interesting to study how Gemini 1.5 Pro scales its in-context learning (ICL) from few to many shots. I found our experiments that avoid using hand-labeled examples with Reinforced ICL, and Unsupervised ICL (i.e. shots are input examples only), particularly neat.

This is a really simple and effective way to reduce the bias in Transformers. We normally prune for efficiency but this paper shows that we can also prune for fairness! Great work by my student Abdelrahman Zayed and collaborators!

It’s sad that some people are trying to block access to algebra for public middle school students. But the height of chutzpah is when these people claim that this promotes equity.

I assume the purpose of the focus on 'ML for social impact' is to get URMs interested in the field (it would be good to hear from the NeurIPS people who created this...), but I think in reality this track will be used by already high-achieving students (not URMs) to further pad

Couldn’t agree more! I would judge people who claim we will achieve AGI in 5 or 10 years!

Why just high-school kids? Please include *all* kids (including toddlers who may potentially submit their creative and original ML ideas with the help of Neuralink chips). Leave no talent untapped in your attempts at making social impact.

2019: Need NeurIPS papers to get postdoc/faculty position.

2024: Need NeurIPS papers to get PhD student position.

2029: Need NeurIPS papers to get into undergrad program.

2034: Admission to NeurIPS onsite daycare requires accepted paper.

📢 Don't forget! TMLR papers can be submitted to #CoLLAs2024 , too! 👇

Oh wow, Canada is playing to win the AI game again. pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-r…

This was sent to me three (3) separate times last week from entirely unaffiliated sources. Leaving it here with no further comment except that it's worth reading carefully.
archives.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-…

Pattern I've noticed: People worry too much about AI doing bad things autonomously & not enough about unethical humans intentionally using AI to do bad things.

This is true now of predictions from 3 years ago. I predict this pattern will continue going forward.

I did not have the privilege to be taught by him. However, he was in the neighbouring office and official chai maker for some of us. I learned a lot about teaching from him. Someone joked that if 'Balki' is the unit of teaching skill and most people measure in microBalki's. :-)

Reminder - submit your recently published journal papers to #CoLLAs2024 by April 29, 2024👇

[LG] Mastering Memory Tasks with World Models
M R Samsami, A Zholus, J Rajendran, S Chandar [Mila – Quebec AI Institute] (2024)
arxiv.org/abs/2403.04253

- The paper introduces Recall to Imagine (R2I), a new model-based reinforcement learning method that integrates structured

Such an amazing job, Mohammad Reza Samsami ! Both me and Sarath Chandar are really proud of you!

This

I am extremely proud of this work by my amazing students Mohammad Reza Samsami and Artem Zholus along with Janarthanan Rajendran (prev. my postdoc, now professor Dalhousie University).

Mohammad Reza Samsami is finishing his masters and is in job market! He is a great catch if you are looking to hire!