Dhruv Agarwal

PhD @Cornell. Past: @MSFTResearch, @GoogleDeepMind, @ashokauniv. Sports fan!

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

Grad school applications are stressful! I shared *practical* tips from my experience at Microsoft Research last year and my slides were greatly appreciated. To encourage inclusivity in academia, I am making my slides public: https://t.co/NuA8er5nB6

#AcademicChatter @ThePhDPlace

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

I interviewed at @SakanaAILabs (research intern) earlier this year and it was one of my favorite interview experiences in ~a decade. The technical assessment was so thoughtfully crafted and so much fun (like those psets in college that gave you eureka moments)! Every interviewer engaged deeply with my solutions from a position of curiosity and collaboration. Unfortunately I couldn't accept the offer due to visa constraints, but I highly recommend anyone interested to apply—I can vouch for the interview process, and it seems like an amazing place to work on fresh, interesting ideas in AI!

[Kai Arulkumaran @kaixhin]

PSA: If you're applying for a research position at @SakanaAILabs (intern/full-time), we have a guide on what we look for

Researchers here pursue different directions - and may disagree - but have thought deeply about why

Over-reliance on LLMs to do your thinking isn't good

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

@SmithaMilli will share once ready!

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

@adityaag Hard relate. Writing code was always my creative expression and it's been disorienting to see it go away. Earlier the joy was in *how* you build stuff, now it's in *what* you build.

Wrote more about this feeling as an ode to coding before AI:
https://t.co/3s0pjSzCN2

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

@TrungTPhan Also check out AI-generated commentary:
https://t.co/l3FjJMbxRU

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

I've been thinking about AI applications beyond chatbots and coding agents. Here's one we came up with:

AI-generated sports commentary! Check it out:

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

The NeurIPS hallucinated citations debacle is a good example of Goodhart's law:

When a measure (NeurIPS acceptance) becomes a target (prestige), it ceases to be a good measure (people will do anything to achieve it)

[Alex Cui @alexcdot]

Okay so, we just found that over 50 papers published at @Neurips 2025 have AI hallucinations

I don't think people realize how bad the slop is right now

It's not just that researchers from @GoogleDeepMind, @Meta, @MIT, @Cambridge_Uni are using AI - they allowed LLMs to generate hallucinations in their papers and didn't notice at all.

It's insane that these made it through peer review👇

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

AGI will come when models stop using .get() to index into Python dictionaries

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

@actuallysoham Haha yeah I built the precursor to messcat (which I gather was on WhatsApp instead of Messenger). Not sure if it's still around!

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

An Ode to Coding Before AI

Like most others, I learned to code in 2014, long before AI coding agents, autocomplete, and such. My friend and I would exchange HTML/CSS/JS tutorials on 1TB hard drives. I’d flip between VLC, Sublime Text, and Chrome on my family’s old HP laptop, trying to center a div or fix a PHP bug I barely understood. We built websites at high school tech competitions without any internet access. In college, I built a lowkey viral Facebook Messenger chatbot that shared our campus food menu and bus timings. It crashed when someone sent it a cat GIF haha. I "vibe-coded" so many other projects (the vibe came from my inexperience) and encountered creative bugs on the way.

Every bug was painful, but every bug taught me something: OS quirks, file systems, logs, APIs, threading, the GIL, tensor dimensions. These days, I use Cursor, Claude Code, and all the AI tools. They’re amazing! But I do feel a weird nostalgia. When AI writes so much of the code, you enjoy the product more than the process. As an engineer, I was wired to enjoy the process, but that's changing.

AI coding makes me productive, but a part of me misses when coding was slow, messy, and deeply personal...

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

I also wrote a longer version of this essay in case you're interested :)
https://t.co/3s0pjSAaCA

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

Excited to be at the Alignment Workshop at @NeurIPSConf 2025 to talk about AI safety and alignment. Unexpectedly some of the conversations were about pre-training, not just post-training! Looks like Gemini 3 Pro is making pre-training cool again!!!

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

AI commentary unlocks new possibilities

- Personalized commentary: beginner-friendly, numbers-focused, drama-heavy, biased to your team...your choice!
- Interactive: e.g. discuss strategy with the commentator as the game unfolds
- Democratizing sports: commentary can drive viewership for smaller/local games

Built this with @justachetan and Sushrut

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

I've been thinking about AI applications beyond chatbots and coding agents. Here's one we came up with:

AI-generated sports commentary! Check it out:

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

@shaily99 Thanks for the thread...exciting times ahead!

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

@vinodgansan @perplexity_ai @OpenAI My cognitive investment at this point is for Chrome, not Chromium. Investment = muscle memory, knowing exactly what it where, down to ~pixel level. If I switch to Comet or Atlas, I lose that flow, and I gain very little (and Chrome will cover up even those small gains soon)

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

My hot take on AI browsers: if it's Chromium-based (@perplexity_ai @OpenAI), I'll try it and move back to Chrome. Too much cognitive investment to leave behind (and Chrome will ship the same features anyway). The only way to dethrone Chrome is to rethink browsing – from scratch!

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

@anupamsobti @perplexity_ai @OpenAI Doesn't it slow you down for less than proportionate productivity gains? My browsing on Chrome is muscle memory. Minor design changes inhibit that flow without much gains

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

@cleoabram Great question @cleoabram
Our paper earlier this year tested this question exactly!
https://t.co/hGA3zQazoT

[Dhruv Agarwal @agdhruv]

If you code in python and aren't using uv yet, this is your sign to jump ship! It's so fast and fun...I look forward to installing dependencies now lol

@astral_sh

[Manoel @manoelribeiro]

This @acm_chi paper finds that AI assistance homogenized writing in a controlled experiment with American and Indian participants (n=118). With a classifier, it was harder to predict writer origin without AI (83.5% vs. 90.6%).

https://t.co/4U3yycxE2E