Buckle up because we're crashing into the new year with my annual database retrospective: License change blowbacks! Databricks vs. SnowflakeDB gangwar! @DuckDB shotgun weddings! Buying a college quarterback with database money for your new lover! cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/20…

🤩🤩 #openai #structured outputs api works amazingly well! Also, have anyone tried to use pydantic generic model instead of base model to pass in the attribute type? I’m probably late in joining the party, but wow this works so well.

New CMU Database Group Course: Database Query Optimization! A survey of how to build a SQL optimizer from scratch covering foundational and state-of-the-art implementations. All lectures available on Youtube: 15799.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2025/

📣 FifTech + Blockchain_at_UCSB + great weather = FBC! This year summit brings finance/tech together, with amazing speakers, incl: Jai Massari Christian Catalini Yu Feng Shiv Spencer Bogart Mallesh Pai ciamac moallemi danning and more.

I'm excited to release the PokéChamp dataset! 🎮 2 million cleaned battle logs from Pokémon Showdown to help train expert-level AI agents for competitive Pokémon. Check out the data on Hugging Face and code on GitHub! 🔗 huggingface.co/datasets/milkk… 🔗 github.com/sethkarten/pok…

🚨 New Paper Alert 🚨 Are you really getting the model you paid for? In our latest work, we uncover a critical trust gap in LLM APIs—and propose methods to audit for covert model substitution. 🕵️‍♂️

SQL-R1 Training Natural Language to SQL Reasoning Model By Reinforcement Learning

Great to see Spanner recognized with this year's ACM SIGMOD Systems Award "for reimagining relational data management to enable serializability with external consistency at global scale". I was fortunate to be able to work on the first versions of Spanner with awesome colleagues

Grand Theft Auto VI is now set to release on May 26, 2026. rockstargames.com/newswire

What a finish! Gemini 2.5 Pro just completed Pokémon Blue!  Special thanks to Joel Z for creating and running the livestream, and to everyone who cheered Gem on along the way.

Sad to see the sunset of USENIX Association ATC. It owns some of my favorite systems research like UVM, QEMU, DTrace, ZooKeeper, Raft, not to mention Sendmail, NFS, Kerberos, X, Tcl, etc. It loses its identity in recent years, but is still among the most hacky conferences I truly enjoy.

This year, we are excited to host the 2nd edition of SoCal DB Day this Friday, May 9th USC! The program is here: sites.google.com/view/socal-db-…. A huge thank you to our incredible SoCal DB community, and a special thanks to our sponsors: USC Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science and @ebay.

Really excited to share that our Pokémon competition is accepted at NeurIPS 2025!🔥 Get ready for an epic AI challenge featuring both speedruns🎮 and multi-player Pokémon battles⚔️---more details coming soon!

CARLOS ALCARAZ DID THE IMPOSSIBLE 🤯🏆 #RolandGarros

Today, I’m launching a deeply personal project. I’m betting $100M that we can help computer scientists create more upside impact for humanity. Built for and by researchers, including Jeff Dean & Joelle Pineau on the board, Laude Institute catalyzes research with real-world impact.

oops did it again

I implemented GRPO and DPO from scratch in vanilla Pytorch to unravel every piece of training details. Hope it could be helpful for those who care about the implementation details of the algorithms. 👉 github.com/mingyin0312/RL… #AI #RL #LLM