1/ With @BenDLaufer and Jon Kleinberg, we constructed the largest dataset of its kind to date: 1.86M Hugging Face models. In a new paper, we mapped how the open-source AI ecosystem evolves by tracing fine-tunes, merges, and more. Here's what we found 🧵

last day to apply to cohort 1!

last day to apply to the @tastelabs research fellowship! if you're tinkering in machine creativity, design, and human-model interaction, you should apply. application in thread. cc @didaoh (the mind behind this!)

First round of applications close on the 1st!

Bullish

AI ought to serve designers and support the creative process; but to make great creative technologies we must first solve several research problems. So stoked that Taste is supporting these types of efforts.

Design and taste are two of the biggest unsolved problems in AI today. Big supporter of this and of @thaiscbranco_

Researchers, esto les puede interesar! Vengan a investigar con nosotros como mitigar el ai-slop :)

Very cool

introducing the @tastelabs research fellowship! for those excited to work on evaluating model creativity, distilling human preference, and ending slop. you'll get compute, custom data, time with top designers and researchers, and a competitive stipend. in person in SF or remote, full time or part time. check out some of the research questions you could explore and apply here: tastelabs.com/blog/requests-…

Super excited to see the fellowship out in the world! Come work with us at @tastelabs on some exciting problems (or pitch us on better ones): from fingerprinting model generations, modeling aesthetic human preference, to building the post-training stack for the unverifiable. DMs open :)

We’re excited to introduce Taste Labs. Our mission is to end AI slop. We’re building the data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste. And today we’re coming out of stealth, announcing our $18.5M seed funding, co-led by @CRV and @AmplifyPartners AI has nailed objective domains and made it easy to generate anything. But it still feels off. Now, the challenge is judgement. What fits, what feels like you, what’s GREAT. This requires turning a fuzzy, subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We’re starting with design. There are two sides to cracking this, the foundation model layer and the agent layer: - We’ve already been working with the top frontier labs to evaluate and improve their models, crafting the right post-training data and RL environments. - We’ve also been working with app-layer companies to build the context and verification tools for their agents to produce better, more on-brand, more creative outputs. We want a future where AI feels right. If you’re passionate about this mission, join us!

Yeah this type motion!!!

🚨 We're open-sourcing Druids, a library for coordinating and deploying coding agents across machines. Our beta users have used Druids to work on open math problems, conduct ML "autoresearch," and make software faster.

Ima have the champion project of the summer I don't think algorithms gone stop the soul from playing a music that charges you up and not turn you down in the good or bad times of life!!

Wrote a new essay with @AbramovichShira for @reboot_hq on procedural data extraction, consumer platforms, what it means for privacy, and the parallels to the attention economy! Cover art is a h/t to Daniel Dennett's "Cartesian theater" by @connie_surf :)

Interact is a fellowship for 19-23 year old technologists, or rather smart people interested in thinking about or working on technology. The community has changed my life and the life of many of my friends for the better. Applications are open now til Feb 9th :) joininteract.com/

How could tiny breakthroughs in aging science change U.S. GDP and population growth? What’s the economic value of making 41 the new 40, or 65 the new 60? How many lives could we create or save if we could slow reproductive or brain aging by just 1 year? What would billions of healthier hours be worth to the economy, if we assume no change in the age of retirement? I spent the last two years obsessing over the design, research, and execution of this project. The result is a book upcoming with Harvard University Press, a preprint, and—maybe your favorite part—an interactive simulation tool that lets you input your own timelines and assumptions for specific breakthroughs in aging bio, then see the ROI in terms of US population & GDP growth. From @RickEcon and Jason DeBacker—the economists who co-developed the open-source, macro model that made this project possible—to extensive comments by @tylercowen, @sapinker, Richard Freeman, @NDHendrix, @ebudish, @elidourado, @geochurch, @jasoncrawford as well as interviews with 102 scientists (!) and countless iterations with award-winning designer Giorgia Lupi and the @pentagram team, we built something we hope will be a benchmark for how scientists, economists, designers, philosophers, entrepreneurs and storytellers can come together to paint, fund, and build different flourishing futures for our species. I couldn’t be more excited to share this. It’s the start of an open and evolving project—the labor and product of love, obsession, and unrelenting care. I hope you have fun playing with our simulation tool — and if you do, please share!

Introducing Splat 🟨📌: Affinity diagramming in a single HTML file. Drag notes and organize ideas on a visual board. With semantic search and an agentic AI assistant. Open source and fully local. (🧵1/6)

We’ll be presenting this paper at the NeurIPS RegML workshop! Looking forward to meeting people in town this week