New Year Letter: 2026
Festivities always warrant reflection. Here is my dose to mark the (Chinese New) year.
Writing is an important way to organize one’s thoughts. If you can’t express something, you probably haven’t thought it through.
I write with two goals:
- to reflect on what I read and learn;
- to make useful information accessible to people who need it.
With these, I consider brevity a writer’s highest virtue.
Recent Posts
The week ahead: 20260209
Some revelations.
The week ahead: 20260202
Industry
The week ahead: 20260126
ICML frenzy!
The week ahead: 20260119
Third week of the year.
The week ahead: 20260112
Second week of the year.
The week ahead: 20251229
First week of the year.
The week ahead: 20251229
Industry
The week ahead: 20251222
[News] Trump to hold state legislatures back from over-regulating AI.
The week ahead: 20251215
[Tweet] GenAI for the US military.
The week ahead: 20251208
[News] Trumps launches the Genesis Mission, a government-wide effort to use federal scientific datasets to train models.
The week ahead: 20251201
[Blog] HOPE. A model as a set of nested sub-optimizers, each with its own context flow and hyperparams. Relevant paper.
The week ahead: 20251124
[Tweet] Sergey’s interview.
The week ahead: 20251117
[GitHub] Karpathy’s EPUB reader for vibe reading. Revelant tweet.
The week ahead: 20251110
[PEP] Python finally officially supports lazy imports!
The week ahead: 20251103
[Article] ChatGPT for mental health.
The week ahead: 20251027
Q3 Earnings Week!
The week ahead: 20251020
[Paper] Synthetic customers for purchase intent prediction. Rather than generating a Likert score for intent (and there would be many relevant techniques ...
The week ahead: 20251013
[Paper] Embedding initialization shown to be related to Grokking (delayed generalization). On the XOR task, embeddings trained on a small model is shown t...
The week ahead: 20251006
[Blog] Thinking Machines Lab: LoRA is better to be applied to all weights, including MLP and MoE. On RL, LoRA performs on par with full training even with...
The week ahead: 20250929
[Announcement] ChatGPT Pulse. ChatGPT can now proactively push personalized content.
The week ahead: 20250922
[Blog][Tweet] Gemini (10/12) and GPT (12/12) compete at ICPC.
The week ahead: 20250915
[Blog] First glimpse into the work of Thinking Machines Lab. Inference systems can be made deterministic by using “batch-invariant” GPU kernels (GitHub im...
The week ahead: 20250908
In NYC for Gemini summit.
The week ahead: 20250901
[Blog] GPT-oss from the ground up.
The week ahead: 20250825
Traveling in Brazil this week to join the indigenous Xingu people for Quarup.
The week ahead: 20250818
[Reuters] Perplexity makes $34.5B bid on Google’s Chrome.
The week ahead: 20250811
[HuggingFace] OpenAI’s open-weight model. Technical report from OpenAI. Onboarding guide from HuggingFace.
The week ahead: 20250804
[Blog] Utkarsh’s insights on the mathematical impossibility of some expectations of AI agents in 2025. TLDR: error compounding, token economics, tool engi...
The week ahead: 20250728
[Report] Alphabet Q2 earnings. CapEx increases for the 2nd time in this year.
The week ahead: 20250721
[Blog] Perplexity to launch its own browser, with rumors of OpenAI’s upcoming release of a similar product, signaling challenges to Google Chrome’s contro...