[These are my own opinions, and not representing OpenAI. Crossposted on Lesswrong] AI has so many applications, and AI companies have limited resources and attention span. Hence if it was up to me, I’d prefer we focus on applications that are purely beneficial— science, healthcare, education — or even commercial, before working on anything related … Continue reading Mass surveillance, red lines, and a crazy weekend

[Guest post by Salil Vadhan; Boaz's note: I am thrilled to see this award. Luca's expository writing on his blog, surveys, and lecture notes was and is an amazing resource. Luca had a knack for explaining some of the most difficult topics in intuitive ways that cut to their heart. I hope it will inspire … Continue reading Trevisan Award for Expository Work

[I work on the alignment team at OpenAI. However, these are my personal thoughts, and do not reflect those of OpenAI. Crossposted on LessWrong] I have read with great interest Claude’s new constitution. It is a remarkable document which I recommend reading. It seems natural to compare this constitution to OpenAI’s Model Spec, but while the documents … Continue reading Thoughts on Claude’s Constitution

TheoryFest 2026 will hold workshops during the STOC 2026 conference week, June 22–26, 2026, in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. We invite groups of interested researchers to submit workshop proposals!  See here for more details: https://acm-stoc.org/stoc2026/callforworkshops.html Submission deadline: March 6, 2026

(If you're not already following him, I highly recommend reading Luca Trevisan's dispatches from Milan, much more interesting than what I write below.) On the topic of my last post, Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times that "In the fog of coronavirus, there are no experts", even citing Scott Aaronson's post. Both Aaronson … Continue reading Experts shmexperts

Scott Aaronson blogged in defense of "armchair epidemiology". Scott makes several points I agree with, but he also advocates that rather than discounting ideas from "contrarians" who have no special expertise in the matter, each one of us should evaluate the input of such people on its merits. I disagree. I can judge on their … Continue reading In defense of expertise

The new coronavirus upended much of society, including our little corner of it. I believe at this point almost all theorists are teaching and doing research at home, and I thought it would be good to share some of the tools we use for doing so. Below I will describe my setup, but I hope … Continue reading Technology for theory: COVID-19 edition

Shcachar Lovett has put together a new website aggregating information about virtual talks in CS theory: https://cstheorytalks.wordpress.com/  It has a Google calendar that people can add to their own, and a form to submit a new talk that automatically gets added to the Google calendar.  This can be a fantastic resource these days that almost … Continue reading New CS theory talk aggragator

From Sandy Irani, FOCS 2020 PC chair: In light of the very unusual developments in the world due to the spread of Covid-19 and the disruption it is causing to many people in our field, especially those with young children at home, the FOCS PC has decided to push back the final deadline for papers … Continue reading FOCS deadline pushed back 6 days

Harvard University, as well most other places that I know of will be moving to remote lectures. I just gave the last in-person lecture in my cryptography course. I would appreciate technical suggestions on the best format for teaching remotely. At the moment I plan to use Zoom and log-in from both my laptop (for … Continue reading Life and CS theory in the age of Coronavirus