Graphics + AI @AMD Research, ex @HPE_Cray, ex @KAUST_Vislab. Thoughts are mine.

Austin, TX
Intuitively, this makes sense. There is a reason that evolution separated "planning" and "acting" into two separate parts of the human brain - the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) for planning and reasoning. And the pre-motor cortex (PMC) that hones in on what needs to be done. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) and premotor cortex (PMC) work together as a command-and-execution hierarchy: the PFC decides why and what to do based on goals and logic, while the PMC translates those abstract choices into concrete physical movement.
The old wisdom strikes again: go where the data is. Turns out there is a lot of video, so training a video planner is actually the *easy* path, albeit expensive. The truth of the matter is that the only way to get generality today is by training on diverse data at scale. Hence, any policy that cannot - in one way or another - scale with data is hopeless. The interesting corollary that Hyunwoo points out here is that if you have expert demonstrations, even if they have action labels, training a video planning (like our Large Video Planner, Vera, and now mirror) is still preferable over training a world model (like Dreamer v4) b/c overall, action labels are scarce. nitter.siddz.com/RyuHyunwoooo/status/21…
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"The essence of embodied intelligence may not be in action at all" - well said @RyuHyunwoooo , and I could not agree more ! Thrilled to have had the opportunity to collaborate with @vincesitzmann , @RyuHyunwoooo and team on enabling Mirror on AMD GPUs. Upwards and onwards !
Replying to @vincesitzmann
We are also very grateful for the support of AMD! @secunit64 and his team provided us with compute via the AMD university research program, and we used their MI350X GPUs to great effect - our code runs on *both* NVIDIA and AMD GPUs! A number of pull requests were merged into PyTorch nightly as a result of this collaboration to ensure high video generation throughput on AMD GPUs! (8/n)
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Welcome to the team @BenMildenhall !
My hope for @theworldlabs has always been to build technology that shows the world something it’s never seen before, and put that technology into peoples’ hands. We’ve now done this multiple times, first with our Marble product release last year, and most recently with our Atlas model, which has just started rolling out in beta. Joining the team at @AMD is an opportunity to up our ambition and aim even higher, playing a crucial role in paving the way for tomorrow’s best AI models to be trained & served on cutting edge next generation hardware, and ensuring that model architectures and chip design co-evolve hand in hand as AI continues to scale. I’m excited for our team to continue developing amazing technology and build out an open model ecosystem that empowers people to unlock new capabilities, new experiences, new product categories, and new ways of interacting with the world.
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A very poignant and thought provoking article on AI and the future of the creative industry by @jeffreykWNDR . Worth your time today -
The World is Changing: AI For Creativity By Jeffrey Katzenberg A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe. Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.” I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both. In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious. There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love. People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft. Is History Repeating Itself? The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul." Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work. A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept. They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded. This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix. What I Learned From Walt Disney In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell. We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not. That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create. A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did. Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.” A Distinction With a Difference I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . . Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new. Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out. Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new. One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable. Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground. A Path Forward In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . . Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human. At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling. The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it. There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us. The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires. What I Learned From Steve Jobs Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities. What I See Coming Soon As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process. Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.
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I was thinking the EXACT same thought as I was reflecting back on this years CVPR. This book was so foundational through my grad school a little over two decades ago.
Based on what happened this year at CVPR 2026, it seems that the vision community is making a full swing back to 3D vision. Just to remind young people who just got interested in this subject, my first textbook, written 20 years ago, is probably still the best introduction to this topic: books.google.com.hk/books/ab…
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A very novel, yet practical approach to long-context video generation using adaptive bit-rates ! Very cool work coming out of @vincesitzmann 's lab!
Introducing MilliVid, our new method for long-context video generation! MilliVid creates videos that are consistent over long time spans, without using retrieval heuristics or 3D maps! (1/n) davidcharatan.com/millivid/#
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A good direction in improving the UI of AI systems!
We're thrilled to share an update to how Claude communicates with people. Rather than always defaulting to text, Claude is learning to choose the best medium for each response — based on the task, the data, and what's most useful for the person.
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I like the logical evolution from fine-tunes (like LoRA etc.) to REPA by @sainingxie 's team, and now self-supervised learning of aligned, 3D grounded features by @bfl_ml with @hila_chefer , @pess_r et al. The bitter lesson by @RichardSSutton is still reaping dividends !
Fixed vision encoders like DINO have driven impressive progress in more learnable representations for generative modeling - but there is no universal variant across modalities, and they do not scale with the generative model. We introduce our self-supervised framework, Self-Flow, that builds learnability directly into flow models, working in a unified and scalable way across image, video and audio. Particularly excited about the gains on video-action prediction: Beyond the overall success rate improving substantially, more complex tasks - like "Open and Place" - see some of the clearest gains. So many interesting research questions to explore to make 🤖 go brrr Super glad to be working with my amazing colleagues @hila_chefer, Dominik, @dustin_podell, Vikash, @Vinh_Suhi, Antonio and @robrombach - as well as the whole @bfl_ml team! arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2603.06507 project page: bfl.ai/research/self-flow
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We need more work like this ! Imagine what this could unlock if @claudeai can also reason visually in real-time ?
Thanks to good people at @AnthropicAI we now have an official MCP for Excalidraw! Take it for a spin on @claudeai (search for Excalidraw in Connectors, or use in Claude Code and elsewhere). More to come. ✌
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Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude. Keep thinking.
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Really appreciate educators who prioritize foundational principles over quick wins. In ML and beyond, strong fundamentals always outlast the hype cycle. Teaching the 'why' before the 'how' builds durable understanding that compounds over time.
I've decided to start teaching full mathematical series on my YT channel! The first video in the series 'An Introduction to Mathematical Proofs' is now live! I've previously only ever explained mathematical ideas in one video at a time but this has been requested by so many of you! This is something new for me so if you can let me know if you enjoyed the video and show it some love (or hype), that would mean the world 🥹
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Haha ! Love this take on the dichotomy.
The "Singular Value Schism" of 2025: LoRA treats the gradient's rank collapse as a divine hint to save VRAM, while Muon treats it as a sinful degeneracy that must be orthogonalized until it confesses the full basis.
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I would love to hear a podcast on this @karpathy !
Quick new post: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight I took all the 930 frontpage Hacker News article+discussion of December 2015 and asked the GPT 5.1 Thinking API to do an in-hindsight analysis to identify the most/least prescient comments. This took ~3 hours to vibe code and ~1 hour and $60 to run. The idea was sparked by the HN article yesterday where Gemini 3 was asked to hallucinate the HN front page one decade forward. More generally: 1. in-hindsight analysis has always fascinated me as a way to train your forward prediction model so reading the results is really interesting and 2. it's worth contemplating what it looks like when LLM megaminds of the future can do this kind of work a lot cheaper, faster and better. Every single bit of information you contribute to the internet can (and probably will be) scrutinized in great detail if it is "free". Hence also my earlier tweet from a while back - "be good, future LLMs are watching". Congrats to the top 10 accounts pcwalton, tptacek, paulmd, cstross, greglindahl, moxie, hannob, 0xcde4c3db, Manishearth, and johncolanduoni - GPT 5.1 Thinking found your comments to be the most insightful and prescient of all comments of HN in December of 2015. Links: - A lot more detail in my blog post karpathy.bearblog.dev/auto-g… - GitHub repo of the project if you'd like to play github.com/karpathy/hn-time-… - The actual results pages for your reading pleasure karpathy.ai/hncapsule/
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DL == "Complexifier" ?
To perfectly understand a phenomenon is to perfectly compress it, to have a model of it that cannot be made any simpler. If a DL model requires millions parameters to model something that can be described by a differential equation of three terms, it has not really understood it, it has merely cached the data.
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Advent of Claude Day 1 - The ! Prefix Don't waste tokens asking "can you run git status or tests?" Just type: ! followed by your bash command The ! prefix executes bash instantly and injects the output into context. No model processing. No delay. No wasted tokens.
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Intriguing work. Now for some bedtime reading this week !
PRX: A 1.3B open t2i model, like SD1.5, trained from scratch & released under Apache 2.0; it uses an MMDiT-like architecture with a T5-Gemma; aims to open-source the entire training process from architecture to alignment. huggingface.co/Photoroom/prx…
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open.substack.com/pub/addyo/… Excellent article by @addyosmani . My experience with AI-coding tools aligns with this. They're ideal for initial MVPs where accuracy or robustness isn't critical and for addressing "known unknowns." However, they struggle with "unknown unknowns," often spiraling into chaos. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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Madhu Srinivasan retweeted
Calling all GPU & AI developers, it’s go time! Join the AMD Developer Challenge 2025! Optimize multi-GPU kernels, win prizes & showcase your AI skills. Visit the challenge page to register and get the full details 👇 amdchallenge2025.datamonster…
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