Jiahao Chen @NeurIPS

Director of AI/ML, @NYCOfficeOfTech. [email protected]. Opinions mine

[Ethan W. Anderson @Ethan_is_online]

I've plotted the most expensive McDonald's burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. This analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081

[Jiahao Chen @NeurIPS @acidflask]

Which Pokemon will I meet? @poke_times ＃ポケモン会えるかな

[in charge of the girls @AmeriKraut]

Dr. Gladys West, Mathematician Whose Work Made GPS Possible, Dies at 95
https://t.co/T3IWgoqRqE

[EleutherAI @AiEleuther]

Can you train a performant language models without using unlicensed text?

We are thrilled to announce the Common Pile v0.1, an 8TB dataset of openly licensed and public domain text. We train 7B models for 1T and 2T tokens and match the performance similar models like LLaMA 1&2

[NeurIPS Conference @NeurIPSConf]

We have been made aware of several fake apps pretending to be the NeurIPS official app. To clarify, NeurIPS is using atconf. We advise attendees to carefully check thet they are downloading the correct app.

[Jiahao Chen @NeurIPS @acidflask]

I'll be at @NeurIPSConf - hmu to talk about new AI developments, applications to public sector or regulated industries, ethics reviews, AI safety and/or AI governance!

[Jiahao Chen @NeurIPS @acidflask]

@xuanalogue why is it that the thing that caught my eye is the tilt in the image

[(((ل()(ل() 'yoav))))👾 @yoavgo]

a key lesson from this is that looking at the data should be the first thing you do, not a last resort after you try to debug some surprising low scores. it really amazes me how many people neglect to do this very obvious thing, and how unintuitive this advice is to them.

[ぷにらいぶ @punilive_X]

斜めに見えるやつ

＋大丈夫＋大丈夫＋大丈夫
＋大丈夫＋大丈夫＋大丈夫
＋大丈夫＋大丈夫＋大丈夫

夫丈大＋夫丈大＋夫丈大＋
夫丈大＋夫丈大＋夫丈大＋
夫丈大＋夫丈大＋夫丈大＋

＋大丈夫＋大丈夫＋大丈夫
＋大丈夫＋大丈夫＋大丈夫
＋大丈夫＋大丈夫＋大丈夫

[New York City Council @NYCCouncil]

INTs 199-A, 926-A, and 1024-A, sponsored by @CMJenGutierrez and @CMJulieMenin, create one of the nation’s first comprehensive municipal frameworks for oversight and transparency in the City’s use of AI by establishing an Office of Algorithmic Accountability and setting basic standards for agency use.

[vx-underground @vxunderground]

I've had a surprising amount of people ask me about Copilot and the stick I'm poking it with. Copilot is a hot topic, so I assume people are genuinely interested in how it works?

I can't really give a good tl;dr because I'm still poking it with a stick. There is a lot of stuff I don't quite understand (as is tradition), so I can only share some of my insights and speculations

Copilot.exe (the main binary) is just a .NET runtime host. MSDN has some articles about it. Basically the .exe you execute does a bunch of fancy shit, it modifies some stuff in the .exe itself (Thread Environment Block) for custom error handling to be all fancy, or whatever. It eventually invokes the Windows Library Core Language Runtime library (libcoreclr) function "coreclr_execute_assembly" and the "real" Copilot runs from Copilot.dll.

Copilot.dll (I'll just call it Copilot, whatever) is a big ass fuck off C#.NET application with what feels like over 9000 dependencies and libraries. It's a big heavy bloated son of a bitch.

Copilot determines the .NET version it's supposed to run on from a JSON file in the current directory titled "runtimeconfig.json".

Copilot uses Microsoft UI Xaml (WinUI 3?) so it is ridiculously heavy and feels like it lags constantly.

Copilot does all AI stuff server side at Microsoft at "copilot-dot-microsoft-dot-com/c/api". It looks* like it authenticates to the Copilot servers using the Microsoft account you make when you first setup Windows 11. It looks like it may also support Apple and Google, but I haven't poked it enough.

Every action taken in Copilot is a "view" and goes through a URI thingy. It's some C#.NET bullshit. I barely understand it. You can easily see all the different "views" and the URI it goes through in Copilot to load different "views" (different parts of Copilot?)

Even simple acts as viewing a different "view", scrolling up to see previous messages sent to Copilot, etc. all go through API requests to Microsoft. It is all stored over on their stuff. Hence, Copilot can feel ridiculously slow when scrolling up to review message history. It goes through stuff like "GetConversationHistoryEndpoint" inside of CopilotNative.Platform (1.25111,85.0 .NETCoreApp, v9.0).

So... anything you do is going to through their web API. It slows things down dramatically. Even renaming a conversation makes a web call.

Also, anytime you send a message to Copilot it goes through a fucking MASSIVE nested procedure that bounces all through all the dependencies. However, this is pretty standard stuff for big .NET applications.

To make a long story short-ish, each message you to Copilot is tokenized (or rather, placed into a "Dictionary"). This dictionary contains the data you're sending and any files you're attaching. Part of this process Copilot makes a very minor attempt at sanitizing data for "anonymity".

Copilot has different stuff in place for removing data and sensitive information but the actual act of sending a message to Copilot only censors file paths from your machine (if you send a file). In other words,

C:\Users\TommyPoop\File.txt
transforms into ..
C:\Users\<redacted>\File.txt

I haven't seen anywhere else where this logic is implemented, but it probably does more stuff somewhere. I doubt they'd include all this PII censoring logic for no reason.

Copilot also has stuff in place for advertisement identifiers, health and fitness, shopping habits, etc. I'm not sure what that's all about. I also see the gaming stuff but I haven't poked that yet either.

Copilot also also has a bunch of stuff for PicassoAI for "PicassoLabs", "PicassoFinance", "PicassoBriefings". I don't know if this is a 3rd party thing or something they made internally. I have no idea what I'm looking at.

Anyway, that is my scattered thoughts on Copilot. It is basically a really, really, really fancy web browser that can only be used to communicate with Microsoft's AI endpoints.

I quickly realized though that if you go to

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

... and make an entry that makes the Microsoft Copilot AI domain resolve to localhost, Copilot implodes and drops dead. It can no longer access any API endpoints hence it cannot exist.

[Karen Hao @_KarenHao]

I am working to address an apparent error for a data point I cited in my book about the water footprint of a proposed data center in Chile. I’d like to explain what happened, what I’m doing to remedy it, and provide more recent data on the water footprint of data centers. 1/

[arXiv.org @arxiv]

#HBD to arXiv!🎈

On August 14, 1991, the very first paper was submitted to arXiv. That's 34 years of sharing research quickly, freely &amp; openly!

Some baby pictures to show how far we've come . . . when we were just a computer under desk . . . &amp; in our 1994 punk phase . . . 👶💾

[Jiahao Chen @NeurIPS @acidflask]

It's that time of year again! @NeurIPSConf is seeking ethics reviewers for -four- review periods in July and August. If you're interested and available, please review our Call for Reviewers and sign up there!

https://t.co/OuO28ca3Nu

[AAAI @RealAAAI]

The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), will be held in Singapore at The Singapore EXPO, January 20-27, 2026. The Main Track of the Technical Program will take place January 22-25, 2026.

➡️ Please note the updated timeline for AAAI-26 abstracts and paper submissions.

May 27, 2025 |Open Review submission site opens for author registration

June 3, 2025 | Open Review submission site opens for paper submission

July 25, 2025 | Abstracts due at 11:59 PM UTC-12

August 1, 2025 | Full papers due at 11:59 PM UTC-12

August 4, 2025 | Supplementary material and code due by 11:59 PM UTC-12

September 8, 2025 | Notification of Phase 1 rejections

September 28-30, 2025 | Author feedback window

November 3, 2025 | Notification of final acceptance or rejection (Main Technical Track)

November 13, 2025 | Submission of camera-ready files (Main Technical Track)

[NeurIPS Conference @NeurIPSConf]

This year's NeurIPS conference will initiate a position track. The position track paper deadline is May 22 AoE for all materials (abstract, full paper, supplementary, etc.). See Call for Paper for more details! https://t.co/327kDKnXpC

[NeurIPS Conference @NeurIPSConf]

NeurIPS 2025 is soliciting self-nominations for reviewers and ACs. Please read our blog post for details on eligibility criteria, and process to self-nominate: https://t.co/hwFtX9Dajx

[Jiahao Chen @NeurIPS @acidflask]

The most Wikipedia thing I've seen in awhile is the warning on the ChatGPT logo page not to give it orders like it's actual ChatGPT and then have a prompt underneath the warning

[Jiahao Chen @NeurIPS @acidflask]

@l_II_llI 🍿

[Jiahao Chen @NeurIPS @acidflask]

Shame on my alma mater

[Andrew @AndrewYatzkan]

AI really replaced my academic advisor 😭😭