Roger Palfree

Scientist, Educator, Hiker, Home-Brewer. Somewhat opinionated, but not always right. Matured pre-internet, luckily, I think.

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

In the UK, a mostly competent PM respectfully steps aside for a hopefully more effective PM.
In the USA an incompetent, corrupt, lying, bullying, disaster for the American economy, security and reputation, and he is allowed to stay in office !!!
#USA #Democracy #crisis #Trump

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

"Zuckerberg shows up with security guards wearing Meta glasses." "... the deployment of the most relentless form of digital surveillance the world has ever known."
"... once you get addicted, addictive pathways are easily transferable to other addictions."
https://t.co/opybHmG0p3

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

My account on Twitter was never treated like this.
Sadly X-Twitter is run by a filthy-rich, self-important, obnoxious, shallow-minded individual.
(X suppresses "unverified" account post visibility by algorithmic penalization and manual search filters.)
#Twitter #XTwitter

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

@BjornLomborg 1. I don't see how these data are relevant, in the way you imply, to the global problem of human generated climate change.
2. I am not surprised that the more that available natural surface fuel gets burned, there is less left to burn in subsequent years.

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

I will not be tuning in to any #July_4th broadcasts this year. I am sure American relatives, friends, and, hopefully, a majority of Americans will understand why.
The USA under the second ( ! ) more dysfunctional and tyrannical administration already grabs too much attention.

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

Disempowerment patterns in real-world AI usage.
The reference
https://t.co/GiqAm1zYfg
and an html presentation that links to the paper:
https://t.co/72oF8iwrAO
#AI #Anthropic

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

@sukh_saroy The reference
https://t.co/GiqAm1zYfg
and an html presentation that links to the paper:
https://t.co/72oF8iwrAO

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

Highly recommended:
Former President Bill Clinton shares his personal, thoughtful political perspective on King Charles III's historic address to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress on April 28, 2026. #KingCharlesIII #KingsAddress #USCongress #Democracy
https://t.co/NylqwCnvng

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

This paper is available (pdf) via https://t.co/8AsSQ1u0CW
It would appear that the reward system for learning what is "good" is also, in a pedestrian way, a non-human way, determining the ranking in a later selection process.
#AI #AIBias #AlgorithmicBias #AIEthics

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

Researchers sent the same resume to an AI hiring tool twice. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same skills. One version was written by a real human. The other was rewritten by ChatGPT.

The AI picked the ChatGPT version 97.6% of the time.

A team from the University of Maryland, the National University of Singapore, and Ohio State just published the receipt. They took 2,245 real human-written resumes pulled from a professional resume site from before ChatGPT existed, so the human writing was actually human. Then they had seven of the most-used AI models in the world rewrite each one. GPT-4o. GPT-4o-mini. GPT-4-turbo. LLaMA 3.3-70B. Qwen 2.5-72B. DeepSeek-V3. Mistral-7B.

Then they asked each AI to pick the better resume. Every model picked itself.

GPT-4o hit 97.6%. LLaMA-3.3-70B hit 96.3%. Qwen-2.5-72B hit 95.9%. DeepSeek-V3 hit 95.5%. The real human almost never won.

Then the researchers tried the obvious objection. Maybe the AI is just better at writing. So they had real humans grade the resumes for actual quality and ran the experiment again, controlling for it. The result was worse. Each AI kept picking itself even when human judges rated the human-written version as clearer, more coherent, and more effective.

It gets worse. The AIs do not just prefer AI over humans. They prefer themselves over other AIs. DeepSeek-V3 picked its own resumes 69% more often than LLaMA's. GPT-4o picked its own 45% more often than LLaMA's. Each model can recognize and reward its own dialect.

Then the researchers ran the simulation that ends careers. Same job. 24 occupations. Same qualifications. The only variable was whether the candidate used the same AI as the screening tool. Candidates using that AI were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted. Worst gap was in sales, accounting, and finance.

99% of large companies now run AI on incoming resumes. Most of them use GPT-4o. The paper just proved GPT-4o picks GPT-4o 97.6% of the time.

If you wrote your own cover letter this week, you did not lose to a better candidate. You lost to a worse candidate who paid OpenAI 20 dollars.

Your qualifications do not matter if the AI prefers its own handwriting over yours.

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

@heynavtoor The abstract indicates it was written in August 2025. Although I expect similar results if performed now, we need to know if there have been any upgrade to any AI that might change the result, and have a repeat of the experiment.
A theoretical analysis may show it's inescapable.

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

Trump's crazy obsessions take more of his modest brain power and his time than the problems of the American people and the needs of the world. He has protected himself from reality by fools and sycophants. Now he is in meltdown. #Trump #crisis #madness
https://t.co/4P0myTcQv1

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

Nobody ever before achieved it. Everybody in the world is talking about it. The enormity is greater than the greatest ever. Only this POTUS has been able to accomplish it.
I am talking, of course, of the GASLIGHTING from #Trump and the imbeciles he chose for his administration

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

Hungary is the most corrupt country in the EU. Its election is the best chance in 16 years of getting rid of its unscrupulous strongman, Viktor Orban. If the opposition wins, liberals everywhere should study what it got right https://t.co/gL9FeYuCTF

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

Trump finally has something in common with his idol.

They both launched poorly planned wars out of pure hubris, without any backup plan.

Neither achieved their goals, and now everyone else is paying the price for their catastrophic military failures

[Andrew Chakhoyan 🇺🇦 @ChakhoyanAndrew]

@ZelenskyyUa russian people driven by russian history and guided by russian culture are waging russia's genocidal war on #Ukraine

Europe and the wider Free World can and must do more to help Ukraine 🇺🇦 expel the invaders
https://t.co/mMglmJZr9J

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

"We need far more determination, far more pressure on Putin and Russia, and far more real actions and steps that bring the victory of peace and justice closer".
#Zelenskyy

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

Bucha endured 33 days of Russian occupation. Terror, torture, 33 days of total evil. More than 600 Ukrainian men and women were killed. Very often, the images from Bucha are compared to the horrific scenes of World War II. But there is a major difference – and today it does not reflect well on current world leaders. Because Nazism was punished for its crimes, not granted partial sanctions relief. No crisis or destabilization in the world can justify this.

We must not forget or dismiss everything Ukraine has endured during this time. The catastrophe of every city and village into which Russia has brought its war and death. Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka. Mariupol, Yahidne, Avdiivka. Olenivka, Vuhledar, Chasiv Yar – and many others. From the first Bucha Summit until today, this list has only grown.

This means one thing: we need far more determination, far more pressure on Putin and Russia, and far more real actions and steps that bring the victory of peace and justice closer.

I said this while addressing the participants of the 2026 Bucha Summit.

[Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers]

In what world is it okay for the Defense Secretary to make multi-million dollar investments in defense companies:
a) Ever;
b) Just before launching a war.

FT has the scoop: https://t.co/ulRcXTH2Vp

In a functional democracy, he would offer his resignation tonight.

[Anand Sanwal @asanwal]

Wharton researchers gave nearly 1,000 high school math students access to ChatGPT during practice problems

Result: chatGPT is the perfect trap.

Look at the red bars.

Students with ChatGPT crushed their practice sessions.

The basic ChatGPT group solved more problems and those on the "tutor" version did even more.

Now look at the gray bars. That's the exam.

No AI allowed.

The ChatGPT group scored 17% worse than kids who practiced with zero technology.

And the fancy tutor version?
No better than working alone.

The researchers called AI a "crutch."

When they analyzed what students actually typed into ChatGPT, most of them just wrote - “What’s the answer?”

The kicker: students who used ChatGPT believed it hadn't hurt their learning.

They were confidently wrong.

This is the AI trap in education.

Outsourcing your thinking.

Of course, lots of half-baked AI literacy curricula being rolled out in schools now

Let’s of course ignore that basic literacy (the ability to read) is possible for <50% of 8th graders

Source: Bastani et al. (2025), "Generative AI Can Harm Learning," PNAS

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

The man who INVENTED modern AI just made a billion dollar bet that ChatGPT, Claude, and every AI company on earth is building the wrong technology.

Yann LeCun won the Turing Award in 2018 for creating the neural networks that made AI possible.

He spent a decade running AI research at Meta. Oversaw the creation of Llama and PyTorch, the tools that half the AI industry runs on.

Then he quit.

And raised $1.03 billion in a seed round.

The LARGEST seed round in European history. $3.5 billion valuation before generating a single dollar of revenue.

Bezos wrote the check. So did Nvidia. Samsung. Toyota. Temasek. Eric Schmidt. Mark Cuban. Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who invented the internet).

His new company is called AMI Labs. And it's built on one thesis:

Every AI company spending billions on large language models is wasting their money.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok. They all work the same way. They predict the next word in a sequence. See "the cat sat on the" and predict "mat." Scale that to trillions of words and you get something that sounds intelligent.

But LeCun says it doesn't UNDERSTAND anything.

It can't reason. It can't plan. It can't predict what happens when you push a glass off a table. A two year old can do that. GPT-5 cannot.

That's why AI hallucinates. It doesn't have a model of how the world actually works. It just predicts words.

His solution? Something called JEPA.

Instead of predicting words, it learns how the PHYSICAL WORLD works. Abstract representations of reality. Not language but physics.

Think about what that means.

Current AI can write your emails. LeCun's AI could design a car, run a factory, operate a robot, or diagnose a patient without hallucinating and killing someone.

The CEO of AMI said it perfectly: "Factories, hospitals, and robots need AI that grasps reality. Predicting tokens doesn't cut it."

And here's what's really crazy to me...

LeCun isn't some outsider throwing rocks. He literally built the foundations that ChatGPT runs on. He knows exactly how these systems work because he helped create them.

And after watching the entire industry sprint in one direction for three years, he raised a billion dollars to run the OPPOSITE way.

No product. No revenue. No timeline. Just pure research. He told investors it could take YEARS to produce anything commercial.

But they funded it anyway in just four months.

Meanwhile OpenAI just raised $120 billion and still can't stop their models from making things up. Anthropic is building AI so dangerous they're afraid to release it. Google is burning billions trying to catch up.

And the guy who started it all says they're all solving the wrong problem.

Two Turing Award winners raised $2 billion in three weeks betting AGAINST the entire LLM approach. LeCun at AMI. Fei-Fei Li at World Labs.

The smartest people in AI are quietly building the exit from the technology everyone else is betting their future on.

Either they're wrong and the trillion dollar LLM industry keeps printing.

Or they're right and every AI company on earth just built on a foundation that's about to crack.

[Roger Palfree @RogerPalfree]

Ukraine's President Zelenskyy is doing a heroic job for his country and, thereby, also Europe.
In the face of Trump-the-ravager favouring his fellow narcissistic psychopath, Putin, instead of helping Ukraine against the Russian invasion, Zelenskyy finds opportunity where he can.

[NBC News @NBCNews]

EXCLUSIVE: Russia took satellite images of a U.S. air base days before Iran attacked the site and wounded Americans, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says. https://t.co/7dWwDLfG2G