--- title: May 2025 News description: May 2025 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO created: 2025-01-25 status: in progress confidence: log css-extension: dropcaps-de-zs backlink: False ... May 2025's [Gwern.net](https://gwern.net/newsletter/2025/05) [newsletter](https://gwern.substack.com/ "'Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)', Gwern 2013") is now out; previous, [April 2025](https://gwern.net/newsletter/2025/04) ([archives](https://gwern.net/doc/newsletter/index)). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my [Changelog](https://gwern.net/changelog); brought to you by my donors on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/gwern). # Writings - ["October The First Is Too Late"](https://gwern.net/fiction/october) - [Cats As Horror Movie Villains](https://gwern.net/cat-horror) - [Speedrunning Is Not Such A Waste of Talent](https://gwern.net/speedrunning) - [Review: _I Remember Lemuria!_](https://gwern.net/review/lemuria) - [Proposal: "you could have invented Transformers" tutorial](https://gwern.net/blog/2025/you-could-have-invented-transformers) - ["Hacking Pinball High Scores"](/blog/2025/pinball-hacking) - ["Human Cannibalism Alignment Chart"](/blog/2025/human-cannibalism) - ["Bell, Crow, Moon: Poetic Variations"](/blog/2025/bell-crow-moon "‘Bell, Crow, Moon: 11 Variations’, Gwern et al 2025") - ["Area Man Outraged AI Not Solved Everything Yet"](/blog/2025/area-man "‘Area Man Angry AI Not Silver Bullet’, Gwern et al 2025") # Links ## AI - ["Creative Preference Optimization"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14442), Ismayilzada et al 2025 - ["Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03906#deepmind), D’Ambrosio et al 2024 (sim2real, evolution strategies, dilated CNNs) [Matters Of](https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/ "'ML Scaling subreddit', Gwern 2020") [Scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law): - ["Fast, scalable, clean, and cheap enough: How off-grid solar microgrids can power the AI race"](https://www.offgridai.us/), Baranko et al 2024 - ["Xi Jinping’s plan to beat America at AI: China’s leaders believe they can outwit American cash and utopianism"](https://www.economist.com/china/2025/05/25/xi-jinpings-plan-to-overtake-america-in-ai) (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"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20238), Vonich & Hakim 2025 - ["Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy: A deeper dive on our findings, what went wrong, and future changes we’re making"](https://openai.com/index/expanding-on-sycophancy/), OpenAI (when RLHF backfires in a way your tests miss) - ["Private Attribute Inference from Images with Vision-Language Models"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10618), Tömekçe 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"](https://slightknack.dev/blog/difflogic/ "‘Compiling a Differentiable Logic Gate Neural Net to C for a 1,744× speedup’, Clayton 2025"), Isaac Clayton (training a differentiable logic-gate NN, then pruning and compiling to C for optimized symbolic equivalent) ## Genetics Everything Is Heritable: - ["The impact on clinical success from the 23andMe cohort"](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.17.24309059.full), Wang et al 2024 Recent Evolution: Engineering: - ["The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food"](https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/02/1116059/the-us-approves-crispr-pigs-for-food/) (Genus's PRRS-virus-resistant pigs) ## Statistics/Meta-Science - ["Cardiorespiratory fitness in adolescence and premature mortality: widespread bias identified using negative control outcomes and sibling comparisons"](https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/eurjpc/zwaf267/8128214), Ballin et al 2025 ([everything is correlated](/everything)) ## Politics/Religion ## Psychology/Biology - ["Snake venom protection by a cocktail of varespladib and broadly neutralizing human antibodies"](/doc/biology/2025-glanville.pdf), Glanville et al 2025 ([the madman did it!](https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/snakebite-antivenom-tim-friede/)) - ["They Don’t Read Very Well: A \[2015\] Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities"](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346), Baty et al 2024 ([discussion](https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read)) - ["Correlation Neglect in Belief Formation"](/doc/psychology/cognitive-bias/2017-enke.pdf), Enke & Zimmermann 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"](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4413784/), Poulin & Randhawa 2013 - ["What Children Fear"](https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1965-maurer.pdf), Maurer 1965 ## Technology ## Economics - ["Your Right Arm For A Publication In AER?"](https://gwern.net/doc/math/humor/2013-attema.pdf), Attema et al 2013 - ["Up Or Down? A Male Economist’s Manifesto On The Toilet Seat Etiquette"](https://gwern.net/doc/economics/mechanism-design/2011-choi.pdf), Choi 2011 ## Philosophy ## Fiction - ["Damien Broderick (1944–2025)"](https://locusmag.com/2025/04/damien-broderick-1944-2025/) # Books **Fiction**: # Film/TV **Live-action**: **Animated**: - [_The Apothecary Diaries_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apothecary_Diaries)