Toby Murray

Go find me at @tobycmurray.bsky.social. Assoc Prof at @UniMelb and @cis_unimelb cyber lead; @DSI_VIC Director; @UniofOxford DPhil (@HertfordCollege); He/him

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

If data is the oil of the new economy, then we must be living in the age of the everyday environmental disaster.

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

@p_droabreu0 Just wait til you try Isabelle and its readable proof language 😂

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

In 2024, when Australia started talking age assurance, I argued device and operating system companies like Apple, Google and MS should provide the foundation, to create an interoperable ecosystem for online child safety. Stoked to see that’s now happening https://t.co/XtnZrtcvr8

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

@ShriramKMurthi Well, I’m glad you didn’t have adoption alongside aesthetics. Especially now that most code is AI written: one imagines AI would be ideally placed to game that particular metric

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

@dcolascione If the rate of vuln creation exceeds that of remediation then the supply (summed over time) will remain infinite, ie. at all times in future there will exist a finite supply of vulns.

[Halvar Flake @halvarflake]

The people that want to believe in "AI consciousness" largely want to believe in their own greatness, and given the unscientific and unfalsifiable nature of "consciousness", there's nothing that will convince them; this is about faith and creating idols, not science.

[Max von Hippel @maxvonhippel]

I am running a formal methods hackathon on November 1st, with a bunch of my friends. Contestants will compete to build normie software -- video games, AI agents, travel booking tools, etc. -- but formally verified. We are going to measure to what degree these tools are usable by SWEs with no prior FM background and no FM-specific education. This is a super exciting opportunity to see where the ergonomic gaps are that we, the FM community, need to fill in order to take advantage of our moment in the zeitgeist. If you want to get involved, please DM me! In particular, I think I've got location/food/tokens/photography all covered, but I need some sponsors for the prizes. If you make a cool gizmo or product we can give away and you're down to donate one, please do so!

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

Sick of hearing about #AI #agents breaking containment? Want to apply formal methods to develop secure, verified sandbox tech atop #seL4? Want to work in beautiful Melbourne? Multiple #postdoc roles available at various levels. Apply now https://t.co/BMxdRDww7y

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

@ShriramKMurthi @joomy @charliermarsh [1] https://t.co/9StAJtTSqM
[2] https://t.co/aclImRfhl7
Paul van Oorschot and I would borrow Kathleen's "fine print" phrasing in our 2018 paper that included some seL4 war stories https://t.co/431wBegYCz
etc etc

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

@ShriramKMurthi @joomy @charliermarsh “formal verification is able to tell you that a program was built right, …[not] that the right program was built” [1]. Autoformaisation makes it easy to “verify” something and not get the guarantees you were hoping for. The hard parts are Kathleen Fisher’s “fine print” [2].

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

My 15yo's band FASEHORSE are playing this Sunday, 6pm at Mamma Chen’s in Footscray.

For the joy of mathematics. For parabolas. For rock and roll. 🤘

Come along.

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

@ShriramKMurthi @krismicinski @fleetingbits How dare you produce a program so packed with excellent papers !

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

@halvarflake Yes! Generating understanding is the goal of all scholarly enquiry. AI is good or bad for science to the degree it aids or hinders that goal, surely.

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

@AndrewCMyers How many talks have you. been to whose value you only appreciated years later? For me that number is certainly very nonzero

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

Lots has been written about the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and “rogue AI.” Much less about why the eval (and ExploitGym) was unsafe by design, and what we should do about it. We need safe containment, not just strong alignment. https://t.co/ACrPl7Xger

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

@krismicinski Just wait until every PhD student is (feeling like they have to be) churning out 3 Tier 1 papers per year rather than just one, because all their peers are harnessing agent teams to accelerate their research output at the expense of curiosity and learning.

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

When I said “the superintelligence is you augmented with AI,” I didn’t just mean AI making discoveries. I meant that every discovery made with AI changes the discoverer. Humankind becomes better equipped to make the next discovery, aided by AI. It’s possibly a virtuous cycle.

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

Anyone asking themselves "if AI can disprove the Jacobian conjecture, what's left for me to do?" ask yourself instead: "Which of yesterday's insurmountable problems might we solve today, with such tools at our command?" The superintelligence is *you* augmented with AI.

[Toby Murray @tobycmurray]

I told my ride share driver to connect to my personal hotspot after his app died seemingly due to the #Telstra outage (I’m with an alternative carrier). It feels oddly intimate, as if I’d asked him to share my drink or borrow my coat