[Guest post by Amir Shpilka and Irit Dinur] https://www.ias.edu/math/events/celebrating-100-years-avi-70-csdm-30 The Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Mathematics is pleased to announce a conference celebrating Avi Wigderson’s 70th birthday and retirement, together with 30 years of the Computer Science and Discrete Mathematics program (CSDM) at IAS. The conference will honor both Avi’s extraordinary scientific legacy and … Continue reading Celebrating 100 Years: Avi 70 + CSDM 30 (June 14-18, 2027)

Here is a quick overview of my intuitions on where we are with AI safety in early 2026: So far, we continue to see exponential improvements in capabilities. This is most visible in the famous “METR graph”, but the trend is clear in many other metrics, including revenue. If you squint, you can even see … Continue reading The state of AI safety in four fake graphs

[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