David Wei @kinddevilly

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

Vol:19 No:7 → Characterizing Parallel Subgraph Matching Performance: A Systematic Study of Interactions, Scalability, and Enumeration vldb.org/pvldb/vol19/p1…

There will be no AI jobpocalypse. The story that AI will lead to massive unemployment is stoking unnecessary fear. AI — like any other technology — does affect jobs, but telling overblown stories of large-scale unemployment is irresponsible and damaging. Let’s put a stop to it. I’ve expressed skepticism about the jobpocalypse in previous posts. I’m glad to see that the popular press is now pushing back on this narrative. The image below features some recent headlines. Software engineering is the sector most affected by AI tools, as coding agents race ahead. Yet hiring of software engineers remains strong! So while there are examples of AI taking away jobs, the trends strongly suggest the net job creation is vastly greater than the job destruction — just like earlier waves of technology. Further, despite all the exciting progress in AI, the U.S. unemployment rate remains a healthy 4.3%. Why is the AI jobpocalypse narrative so popular? For one thing, frontier AI labs have a strong incentive to tell stories that make AI technology sound more powerful. At their most extreme, they promote science-fiction scenarios of AI “taking over” and causing human extinction. If a technology can replace many employees, surely that technology must be very valuable! Also, a lot of SaaS software companies charge around $100-$1000 per user/year. But if an AI company can replace an employee who makes $100,000 — or make them 50% more productive — then charging even $10,000 starts to look reasonable. By anchoring not to typical SaaS prices but to salaries of employees, AI companies can charge a lot more. Additionally, businesses have a strong incentive to talk about layoffs as if they were caused by AI. After all, talking about how they’re using AI to be far more productive with fewer staff makes them look smart. This is a better message than admitting they overhired during the pandemic when capital was abundant due to low interest rates and a massive government financial stimulus. To be clear, I recognize that AI is causing a lot of people’s work to change. This is hard. This is stressful. (And to some, it can be fun.) I empathize with everyone affected. At the same time, this is very different from predicting a collapse of the job market. Societies are capable of telling themselves stories for years that have little basis in reality and lead to poor society-wide decision making. For example, fears over nuclear plant safety led to under-investment in nuclear power. Fears of the “population bomb” in the 1960s led countries to implement harsh policies to reduce their populations. And worries about dietary fat led governments to promote unhealthy high-sugar diets for decades. Now that mainstream media is openly skeptical about the jobpocalypse, I hope these stories will start to lose their teeth (much like fears of AI-driven human extinction have). Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! AI will lead to a lot more good AI engineering jobs, and I’m also optimistic about the future of the overall job market. What AI engineers do will be different from traditional software engineering, and many of these jobs will be in businesses other than traditional large employers of developers. In non-AI roles, too, the skills needed will change because of AI. That makes this a good time to encourage more people to become proficient in AI, and make sure they’re ready for the different but plentiful jobs of the future! [Original text in The Batch newsletter.]

I'm delighted that @coursera and @udemy have come together as one company to serve learners. Both Coursera and Udemy were founded with the belief that access to high-quality education changes lives. Over the years, both companies have advanced this goal, creating opportunities for individuals, organizations, and communities around the world. That role is even more important now, as AI is changing the nature of work and increasing the need for continuous learning. Helping people build job-relevant skills will be critical to how we create a better world. By combining the strengths of both ‌companies, we can better serve this need. We bring together a broader range of learning content, trusted instructors and educators, and engaging learning experiences. This creates new opportunities to make learning more personalized, more applied, and more accessible at scale. I’m excited to serve as Chairman of the combined company, working alongside Greg Hart and the leadership team. There is a strong foundation in both organizations, and I look forward to what the teams will build together to expand access opportunity globally. Learn more: blog.coursera.org/coursera-and-u…

I had a good time discussing yesterday's Google TPU v8t and v8i announcement at Cloud Next with Amin Vahdat along with @AcquiredFM hosts @gilbert and @djrosent. The blog post announcement has lots of details about these new chips: blog.google/innovation-and… Here's a thread of some particular things I'm excited about:

It's been a delight to provide small amounts of advice and suggestions to people working on the Decoupled DiLoCo training system. This approach enables graceful handling of failures in large scale training jobs, by allowing (N-1) / N units to proceed when one fails. Thread ⬇️

Arthur Douillard @Ar_Douillard

2 months ago

The DiLoCo team at Google DeepMind and Google Research is proud to release Decoupled DiLoCo, the next frontier for resilient AI pre-training. Decoupled DiLoCo enables training with datacenters across the world, using heterogeneous hardware, and never halting the system despite

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New paper: "Agentic Forecasting using Sequential Bayesian Updating of Linguistic Beliefs". Our system (BLF) matches human superforecasters on ForecastBench, and beats all the top methods (GPT-5, Cassi, Grok 4.20, and Foresight-32B). 🧵

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The founders of FloeDB (@markcusack + Kurt Westerfeld) gave an interesting talk with @CMUDB about their new @ApacheIceberg-compatible query engine. Two key takeaways from their talk: 1⃣ Floe is a hard fork of @YellowbrickData. 2⃣ Floe is building a "catalog-of-catalogs" youtube.com/watch?v=Kq3csH…

Vol:19 No:6 → Quantization Meets Projection: A Happy Marriage for Approximate k-Nearest Neighbor Search vldb.org/pvldb/vol19/p1…

Vol:19 No:6 → Structural Normalization of Property Graphs vldb.org/pvldb/vol19/p1…

Vol:19 No:5 → LLM-AutoDP: Automatic Data Processing via LLM Agents for Model Fine-tuning vldb.org/pvldb/vol19/p7…

Vol:19 No:5 → Learned Static Function Data Structures vldb.org/pvldb/vol19/p9…

Hedged requests (apparently inspired by the Tail at Scale paper by myself and Luiz Barroso) applied within a single machine to replicating data across DRAM channels and issuing reads to all channels, using the one that comes back first. ~5-15X reduction in p99.99 read latency. github.com/LaurieWired/ta… Cool stuff, @lauriewired! Accompanying video forwarded to me by a friend, which is how I learned about it: youtube.com/watch?v=QFi2WV…

Anthropic fucking killed it (again). biggest ai product launch of the year so far. claude can now control your entire computer autonomously. anything you can do on a computer - claude can. your very own digital employee. - any app, browser, file, spreadsheet, tool claude can intelligently access and operate. - claude controls your entire screen (like a human), no connectors. this is a huge step-up in intelligence. - best part: you can text claude to do things from your phone and it'll do work on your computer! - in the last week anthropic has shipped 9 features that have built up to this: a fully automated digital human. unreal

Claude @claudeai

3 months ago

You can now enable Claude to use your computer to complete tasks. It opens your apps, navigates your browser, fills in spreadsheets—anything you'd do sitting at your desk. Research preview in Claude Cowork and Claude Code, macOS only.

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I use Claude code a lot these days , but only let it touch personal code that is under GitHub version control, to avoid this kind of situation….

Summer Yue @summeryue0

4 months ago

Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.

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I just watched a really great conversation about the future of AI. Every politician should watch it before they join the lemmings saying that regulation of AI will interfere with innovation. youtube.com/watch?v=rGAA59…

Computer scientists love SAT problems. They leave us feeling very satisfied.

Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai

5 months ago

Helpful update for students, you can now take full practice SATs for free in the @GeminiApp. It uses vetted content from @ThePrincetonRev and gives you feedback straight away. Starting with the SAT today, but more tests are on the way!

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I recently came across this database system in my travels: medium.com/@sschepis/i-bu… The title immediately raises my BS alarms. They claim to "teleport data" via "quantum mechanical principles".

I don't want to punch down on an early stage company but I think these people are trying to sell MMAP as a service?!? No technical details except it appears to be a MMAP buffer pool. I also don't know why their system is "Full ACID" but @RocksDB is not? ryjoxdemo.com/solutions/edge…

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