Every parent in India knows about JEE, very few have heard of the Olympics of algorithms and programming for school students. It is called International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Each country sends its best 4. Here's how India picks its 4. Step 1: ZIO or ZCO Two entry exams. A student can take one or both, and clearing either is enough. ZIO is a 3-hour reasoning paper. You solve puzzles on paper and type in only the final answers, so no coding is needed. ZCO is a 3-hour programming contest in C, C++, Java or Python. Step 2: INOI The national round. A 3-hour programming contest, C++ only. The top performers win gold, silver and bronze medals. Step 3: IOI Training Camp (June 2027) Around 30 INOI toppers spend about two weeks training and taking selection tests. The best 4 become Team India. And the field is tiny. Last year, 454 students across India took ZCO. 125 of them qualified for INOI. 36 made the camp. Compare that to the lakhs of people giving JEE. The camp and Team India's travel are sponsored, so cost isn't a barrier once you're in. What is the benefit of going through this olympiad track? → Various IITs admit you if you make it to the camp. → CMI gives direct admission to INOI gold and silver medallists in Class 11 or 12 → IIIT Hyderabad lets INOI gold and silver medallists apply through its olympiad route → IIIT Delhi adds up to 2 bonus points to your JEE Main percentile for reaching INOI → NUS Singapore gives special consideration to INOI gold medallists → Top US colleges offer you huge scholarships to IOI participants and medalists. If you're a parent, or an elder brother or sister, of a school student who loves math or puzzles, tell them about this today. Any board, any class up to 12. Sit with them and help them register. - ZIO registration closes this Friday, 6 Nov, 9 PM IST. - ZCO registration is open till 1 Dec. Registration can be done here: lnkd.in/gMbP2JUt The full official list of incentives is on the IARCS page: lnkd.in/gQYCUfjW If you are a parent of a student who wants to get started in this domain, I would be happy to mentor them free of cost. I never got a chance to do competitive programming in school but did make it to the Olympics of CP in college - the ICPC World Finals and the only thing I regret is not starting in school.

I'm on the industry job market this year! I'm a PhD student at CMU LTI. My work spans post-training, evals, alignment and multimodality! Please reach out (DM) if you are hiring and think I'd be a good fit, I'd love to chat :) Website: simran-khanuja.github.io/ CV: simran-khanuja.github.io/ass…

RT @jaseweston: Claim: Humans & AI are better together if we want to recursively (co-)improve to a brighter future for *humanity* Instead…

I've been really fascinated by the DL Alchemy course (deep-learning-alchemy.github…). The decision to put the burden of theory construction on the student (and their claude) feels transformative and surprisingly challenging. Maybe knowledge in ML was never that critical.

Our team @GoogleDeepMind is hiring 3 PhD Student Researchers for 2027 to work on exciting, cutting-edge projects focused on understanding, evaluating, and aligning frontier AI agents and multi-agent systems. Signal your interest here forms.gle/2onGFBnyk7MaCdJn8 and spread the word!

I am happy to announce an opening for a student researcher on my team at GDM for 2027, based in London - for a project at the frontier of multi-agent coordination, in duration of 3 months with a possibility of an extension.

We're planning to host a student as part of the Google DeepMind student researcher program. The goal of the project is to understand what makes LLM-human communication effective, and to use the findings to improve models. Good project for PhD students interested in user simulation, HCI, multi-turn interaction/RL, computational cognitive science, or related topics. This is a 24-week position in NYC. Submit an expression of interest here: forms.gle/sHQnbJbHY8SM6g5NA

Today we’re launching Datology Labs: a new commitment to open and collaborative research into the science of data. Research has been a core pillar of DatologyAI from the start. Now we’re partnering with researchers at universities and across industry to take it further.

Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (labs.xbox.com). Here is the note that I sent to the team: Team, The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together. In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another. These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating. I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have. Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway. Asha

"Working with one’s door closed lets you get more work done per year than if you had an open door, but I have observed repeatedly that later those with the closed doors, while working just as hard as others, seem to work on slightly the wrong problems, while those who have let their door stay open get less work done but tend to work on the right problems!" -Hamming

Hand-painted normals + #tsl postprocessing Project link: mesq.me/jelly-painting/ Also here: + brush strokes based on color gradients + fixed dither noise + soft body wobble + transmission material from #threejsblocks Inspired by @mamomiji #threejs #webgpu

I'll be at #colm2026 next week! Happy to chat about post training, synthetic data generation and evaluation for: * Agentic workflows/tool calling * User simulation * Memory and context * Small models

We turned Qwen3.8-27B into a multimodal decision model. It beat Pokémon FireRed’s elite four and champion with sub-100 ms decisions from live game state. With SGLang’s native /v1/decisions, you can now turn LLMs and VLMs into classification and scoring models. We also added /v1/systemone so Jev-like open models can work with the TypeSafe SDK.

Looking forward to SF? Well, we have the best local guide to whet your appetite Prepared by our local chair @jurafsky ! docs.google.com/spreadsheets…

The Perplexity Research Fellowships are a great opportunity to advance frontier research around architecture design, multi-agent collaboration, synthetic data, and beyond! Priority deadline of Sep 30. jobs.ashbyhq.com/perplexity/… 
Feel welcome to mention my name in your application!

get in loser we’re going to risk embarrassment in pursuit of human connection

I’ll be at COLM in SF from Oct 5–9. It’ll be my first in-person conference in 6.5 years, and my first extended stay in SF in 8 years! I'd love to meet mutuals & folks working on LLM post-training at established labs & neolabs. Please DM or reply here and we'll coordinate 💛

Netflix's member foundation models team is hiring a Winter '26 PhD research intern to build LLM-driven AutoResearch agents/harness for improving traditional recommendation models. Apply here: explore.jobs.netflix.net/car… If you’d be at COLM & think you’d be a good fit, DM to chat.

Introducing Benchmark Reviews: our new initiative to audit AI benchmarks. We are launching with 15 benchmarks: 4 Verified, 9 Flawed, and 2 with not enough information for a review.