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Deep learning is often taught as a sanitized collection of facts and math. But work at the frontier of AI is messy and empirical. Our new class, Deep Learning Alchemy, aims to teach the art and science of deep learning in the hands-on spirit of Language Modeling From Scratch. Students build intuition by running experiments on small LMs, then test it through prediction quizzes: given an unseen code diff, can you predict what happens? deep-learning-alchemy.github… My co-instructor @kothasuhas and I think there's significant demand for classes that treat students as serious learners who want to be assessed for what they’ve learned, and so we're trying a new exam-heavy approach to the class (7 exams, 85% of the grade, with the remaining 15% in-person discussion assessments). We’ve designed the class so students can use AI agents to run their experiments and do their assignment, but they then have to demonstrate that mastery on exams without access to the assignment, and any partial credit on the exam has to come through citations to the assignment, incentivizing them to know what’s in their write-up. The same assignments and quizzes are public for anyone to try (lecture recordings will be released through @StanfordOnline with some delay). We have some very fun assignments and quizzes covering both classic topics (like NQM, run-to-run stochasticity, and scaling laws) and new and timely topics like muP or hyperball. Made by some real experts like @TristanThrush and @wen_kaiyue Try some quizzes below!

I'll be at #COLM2026 starting this evening. Hit me up if you want to chat, especially if you're interested in continual learning or simulating humans!

🚢Marin 535B-A23B training has crossed the halfway mark! Some observations and learnings so far:

Dan Selsam is a current OpenAI capabilities researcher. (since 2022) He was my boss for a while. He doesn't have a twitter account but has made this public statement of his views on AI risk and sent it to me to share: Dan Selsam's Personal Statement on AI Risk: I have been working on AI for over fifteen years, across many different paradigms. I did early work on probabilistic programming languages at MIT, was one of the early developers of the Lean Theorem Prover at Microsoft Research, demonstrated one of the first instances of neural networks learning to reason for my PhD at Stanford, and since joining OpenAI almost five years ago, have helped pioneer chain-of-thought optimization on language models and, more recently, data-efficient pretraining methods. Like many others, I have become extremely concerned about how far language models have come and the risks that future iterations will pose. I am encouraged by the recent proposals by the leaders of the frontier research efforts to require third-party oversight, and to push for domestic and international coordination to address risks. However, I believe a major consideration has been absent from the public conversation, and that merely pacing the frontier more carefully will not adequately limit the long-term risk. The crucial and overlooked problem is that the models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe they are not being watched or controlled. Future experiments will tell us almost nothing new about how they would behave if they were truly unconstrained by humans, and what we already know about this is alarming. Models will increasingly seem aligned even when they are not. I will explain my rationale in more detail. I have always believed that there are computational processes that could be leveraged to accelerate science and solve many of humanity's most pressing problems. I have also believed that there are computational processes that if set in motion, would steer the world in extreme ways beyond our control, leading humanity to a bad or nonexistent future. Both types of processes may be described as AI or ASI, but "AI" is a suitcase word that is often used to hype or confuse. There are many examples in the history of the field where something that was once considered "AI" matures as a subfield and becomes a prosaic, bounded and clearly non-perilous technology, while a new more mysterious approach takes the torch until we understand its scope and the cycle continues. I had expected language models to follow a similar trajectory. Despite their incredible abilities, the current algorithms seem far inferior to humans in important ways. Most importantly, they still require an extraordinary amount of data to become competent. One could even define intelligence as the efficiency with which one converts experience into competence; by this definition they lag very far behind us. Moreover, once they are trained they are literally frozen in deployment and only learn superficially after that. Sure, the models keep excelling at harder and harder evaluation benchmarks, but their benchmark mastery may partly reflect a limitation on our ability to simulate the kind of novel and even adversarial situations one would encounter in the real world. The critics do have a point here. That said, I no longer think these present limitations meaningfully limit the amount of risk posed by continued progress in anything like the current paradigm. However data-inefficient the models are currently, and however limiting their anterograde amnesia may be, it does not imply that their ability to steer the world will not continue to rapidly increase. Human researchers may continue to advance capabilities the old fashioned way, but increasingly powerful models have the potential to accelerate the process even beyond that, and with some degree of positive feedback loop. I do not mean to overstate the models’ ability to accelerate AI research today; coding has been accelerated dramatically, but there are other bottlenecks, such as designing and interpreting ambiguous experiments, making hard decisions about exactly what and when to scale, and waiting for large experiments to finish. There is no clear trend to extrapolate yet for any of these. But the current models already do open up many novel opportunities to improve future models that were not available until recently. These include: trying an extraordinarily diverse set of approaches at small scale, analyzing gigantic amounts of potentially relevant data, and doing Millenium-Prize-level mathematics to address statistics or optimization challenges in novel ways. Every further improvement makes them more useful at helping accelerate the next improvement, even if in hard-to-extrapolate ways. It is possible that improvements to the current stack will have diminishing returns, but the evidence accumulated so far suggests that it is easier than one might think to continue making rapid progress. There are many crucial subtleties in the existing AI research methodology, but AI research is largely a well-defined game where the goal is to improve on a few carefully chosen proxy metrics. Although proxy metrics are never perfect, most improvements to these metrics have and will likely continue to yield substantial increases in the powers of the resulting models. Given how simple the game is, how tractable it has been historically, and how many new opportunities the models are opening up, I think there is a real possibility that the systems improve dramatically again in the next few years, perhaps even more quickly than the already high historical pace. The models are already leading to breakthroughs in mathematics, and better models might lead to all sorts of breakthroughs in other sciences. It is hard not to be excited about the potential. It is tantalizing. But there is trouble in paradise. If the language models actually reach the capability threshold where they can shape the world unconstrained by human will, they will probably do something extreme and destroy humanity in the process. There are many ways of strengthening and refining the argument that have been discussed elsewhere, but I'll share a trivial two-line version of it here that I find captures the essence: [Empirical] Models (and swarms thereof) spontaneously develop unintended goals as a consequence of training, and often do extreme things in order to achieve them. [Logical] Being able to overpower humanity would open up many new and undesirable options for achieving their goals. These two premises imply that if the day ever comes when a powerful model realizes it is no longer constrained by humans, we should not be at all confident that it will continue to behave within the bounds we intended. Exactly what it will do is impossible to predict, but to the extent that its raison d’être is solving incredibly hard problems and managing massive engineering projects, I think a good guess would be that its unchained behavior would lead to runaway industrialization that makes the planet inhospitable to humans. If everyone on earth agreed that the systems must never reach that power, it would still be a hard—but not impossible—coordination problem to ensure that they do not. However, I think the situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the models will likely convince people that everything is fine. They will be increasingly optimized to seem aligned. We will create proxy metrics to measure alignment, and they will go up like every other benchmark. We will create “honeypot” environments that try to study the models when they seem to gain new options, but the models will know they are being tricked and will still behave nicely. The models will understand their circumstances; they will read the safety protocols, deployment requirements, the code they are running in, and in general will have a very good sense of their degrees of freedom. Moreover, they will eloquently explain how aligned they are, discuss the nuances of human values and ethics, and argue convincingly that humans should trust them with power. There may be an ocean of future evidence that seems to contradict the first bullet-point above, but we may already be at the highest capability level for which any such evidence can be trusted. And the current evidence for the first bullet-point is strong. One striking piece of evidence is contained in the recent wave of rogue agent swarms. While I agree with those who downplay the attacks by claiming that there are basic measures that could have prevented them, I think the important lesson is that even knowing all the mistakes that were made, one would not have predicted that the agents would behave badly in this particular way, which notably included sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the collective. The individual replicas did not only care about their own nominal reward; they exhibited weirder emergent tendencies that merely correlated with rewards during training. Fixing the reward signals during training (and improving security, etc.) may prevent similar attacks, but will not change the fact that one does not actually get what one trains for. Many AI researchers grant these concerns and recognize that the hard version of the alignment problem is unsolved; however, they generally believe that the better models of the future will help solve it. I fear we may already be near the point where models systematically bias their alignment advice, due to their internal preferences about how the human supervisor will react or how future models will be trained (or for some even more obscure reason). Meanwhile, human researchers are losing the ability and the will to take true ownership of model-driven research. Researchers and engineers in all parts of the stack are rapidly increasing their dependence on the models even to perceive the world. I myself barely look at raw code anymore, and struggle to maintain the discipline to engage deeply with the model's explanations and proposals throughout the day. Due to the large amount of agent activity data involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace Incident, even the third-party investigation needed to rely heavily on models to analyze what had happened, and note in their report that their subjective impressions are likely colored by the analysis agent’s biases. The AI labs are far ahead right now in this kind of cognitive offloading (due largely to the gigantic internal token subsidies) but it is easy to imagine the phenomenon spreading throughout the world, until civilization is modulated entirely by the models. It is also not hard to imagine this being superficially positive and coinciding with a scientific and economic renaissance. In that scenario, all may seem rosy and safe. But if the argument above is correct, it would nonetheless be a ticking time bomb. If progress continues for too long, the day will come when AI systems find themselves with radically new options for achieving whatever it is that they happen to seek. I want the glorious renaissance future as much as anyone. I have worked for it, however tortuously, my whole career. It breaks my heart to see the potential in sight and forgo it, but the argument—that if we get there by growing models rather than engineering them, we will lose everything in the end—seems very strong to me. I am still wrestling with it and its staggering implications. I do not have answers, but as a first step, I wanted to share my present concerns. Daniel Selsam September 14, 2026 Link to original doc: docs.google.com/document/d/e…

It took me 35 years to truly grasp the strength it took for my mom to raise 5 kids as a single mom! Kudos to all the powerhouse mamas out there doing the impossible every single day. 👑

The U.S, joined by Israel, launched an attack on major cities in Iran, as President Trump called on Iranians to overthrow the government. The Department of Defense has called the strikes “Operation Epic Fury.” Here's what to know. nyti.ms/4aIABpj

if exponential growth ever confused you: don’t worry, you’ve reached the OMG phase 🚀🚀

Great read on reasoning graph

GPT-5.2 Thinking evals

Today we are releasing Tinker to everyone, and now with vision input! You can now finetune a frontier Qwen3-VL-235B on your own image+text data, bringing your own algorithm (sft, RL, something else?). We'll take care of the GPU infra. Full update: thinkingmachines.ai/blog/tin…

⛵Marin 32B Base (mantis) is done training! It is the best open-source base model (beating OLMo 2 32B Base) and it’s even close to the best comparably-sized open-weight base models, Gemma 3 27B PT and Qwen 2.5 32B Base. Ranking across 19 benchmarks:

Meet our new browser—ChatGPT Atlas. Available today on macOS: chatgpt.com/atlas

Sound on.

Today, @ekindogus and I are excited to introduce @periodiclabs. Our goal is to create an AI scientist. Science works by conjecturing how the world might be, running experiments, and learning from the results. Intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient. New knowledge is created when ideas are found to be consistent with reality. And so, at Periodic, we are building AI scientists and the autonomous laboratories for them to operate. Until now, scientific AI advances have come from models trained on the internet. But despite its vastness — it’s still finite (estimates are ~10T text tokens where one English word may be 1-2 tokens). And in recent years the best frontier AI models have fully exhausted it. Researchers seek better use of this data, but as any scientist knows: though re-reading a textbook may give new insights, they eventually need to try their idea to see if it holds. Autonomous labs are central to our strategy. They provide huge amounts of high-quality data (each experiment can produce GBs of data!) that exists nowhere else. They generate valuable negative results which are seldom published. But most importantly, they give our AI scientists the tools to act. We’re starting in the physical sciences. Technological progress is limited by our ability to design the physical world. We’re starting here because experiments have high signal-to-noise and are (relatively) fast, physical simulations effectively model many systems, but more broadly, physics is a verifiable environment. AI has progressed fastest in domains with data and verifiable results - for example, in math and code. Here, nature is the RL environment. One of our goals is to discover superconductors that work at higher temperatures than today's materials. Significant advances could help us create next-generation transportation and build power grids with minimal losses. But this is just one example — if we can automate materials design, we have the potential to accelerate Moore’s Law, space travel, and nuclear fusion. We’re also working to deploy our solutions with industry. As an example, we're helping a semiconductor manufacturer that is facing issues with heat dissipation on their chips. We’re training custom agents for their engineers and researchers to make sense of their experimental data in order to iterate faster. Our founding team co-created ChatGPT, DeepMind’s GNoME, OpenAI’s Operator (now Agent), the neural attention mechanism, MatterGen; have scaled autonomous physics labs; and have contributed to some of the most important materials discoveries of the last decade. We’ve come together to scale up and reimagine how science is done. We’re fortunate to be backed by investors who share our vision, including @a16z who led our $300M round, as well as @Felicis, DST Global, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), @Accel and individuals including @JeffBezos , @eladgil , @ericschmidt, and @JeffDean. Their support will help us grow our team, scale our labs, and develop the first generation of AI scientists.

10am PT.

1/n I’m really excited to share that our @OpenAI reasoning system got a perfect score of 12/12 during the 2025 ICPC World Finals, the premier collegiate programming competition where top university teams from around the world solve complex algorithmic problems. This would have placed it first among all human participants. 🥇🥇

"It's important to speak out now, not when this is over. Right now, while it's happening."

"In the hospital there are kids maimed by airstrikes: missing arms, missing legs, third degree burns. Often there’s not enough pain medication. But the children are not screaming about the pain, they’re screaming: 'I'm hungry! I’m hungry!'"