May 2025 News
May 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
May 2025’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, April 2025 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
Links
AI
“Creative Preference Optimization”, et al 2025
“Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis”, et al 2024 (sim2real, evolution strategies, dilated CNNs)
“Fast, scalable, clean, and cheap enough: How off-grid solar microgrids can power the AI race”, et al 2024
“Xi Jinping’s plan to beat America at AI: China’s leaders believe they can outwit American cash and utopianism” (fast-follower strategy & avoiding AGI arms-race due to disbelief in transformative effects)
“Testing the Limit of Atmospheric Predictability with a Machine Learning Weather Model”, 2025
“Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy: A deeper dive on our findings, what went wrong, and future changes we’re making”, OpenAI (when RLHF backfires in a way your tests miss)
“Private Attribute Inference from Images with Vision-Language Models”, et al 2024 (analyzing photos for privacy leaks scales well from LLaVa 1.5 13B to GPT-4-V; GPT-o3 et al are doubtless even better…)
“Compiling a Neural Net to C for a 1,744× speedup”, Isaac Clayton (training a differentiable logic-gate NN, then pruning and compiling to C for optimized symbolic equivalent)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
“The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food” (Genus’s PRRS-virus-resistant pigs)
Statistics/Meta-Science
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
“Snake venom protection by a cocktail of varespladib and broadly neutralizing human antibodies”, et al 2025 (the madman did it!)
“They Don’t Read Very Well: A [2015] Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities”, et al 2024 (discussion)
“Correlation Neglect in Belief Formation”, 2017 (one of the dangers of synthetic media is echoing the same story or fact at you in many different-seeming guises)
“Evolution of parasitism along convergent lines: from ecology to genomics”, 2013
“What Children Fear”, 1965
Technology
Economics
Philosophy
Fiction
Books
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated: