Eric Malmi

post-training @ Lovable | adjunct prof @ Aalto | ex-Google DeepMind

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

Language models can't play chess, right?♟️ Excited to share our latest experiment that let's you play chess against a Gemini model!

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

@AatuSelkee 📜 Paper: https://t.co/yZpzC7DNpV
💻 Demo: https://t.co/aQVMPMDd61
📦 Code: https://t.co/xddXg2EwJW

This was a great collaboration with @AatuSelkee @SeveriRissanen @Xidong_Feng and @TZahavy 🙏

5/5

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

🚨 New preprint on creative chess puzzle generation with diffusion models is out! ♟️

In his exceptional MSc thesis, @AatuSelkee introduced a new RL recipe on top of a masked diffusion model improving the previous SOTA.

We're open-sourcing the model and releasing a demo 🚀

1/n

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

@AatuSelkee Diffusion models allow us to naturally condition the generation of the puzzles with a partial board, best move, and themes.

Try out our demo at: https://t.co/aQVMPMDd61

4/n

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

the podcast is done with my co-host @arnosolin (who was traveling when we recorded this episode), @AaltoUniversity and ELLIS Institute Finland

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

I had the privilege of sitting down with @kchonyc for our new AI podcast "And humanity created intelligence". we discussed the backstory behind the attention paper as well as... 🧵

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

- is recurrence making a comeback in LLMs?
- how does Kyunghyun select problems to work on?
- advice for students
- why was coming to Finland 🇫🇮 among the best decisions he has made?

Youtube: https://t.co/IzbZb21qhZ
Spotify: https://t.co/BpIF3eSAzg

[Dr Katarina Slama @katarinaslama]

I joined Aalto University's podcast "And humanity created intelligence" for an episode on AI safety, including the recent OpenAI / Hugging Face attack.
Many thanks to @ericmalmi and @arnosolin for a great conversation!

https://t.co/H9QmJLZJYv

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

@yoavgo agreed on the importance of teaching data!

I've used a course project where the students are given a fine-tuning environment and need to produce the dataset (e.g. for GEC)

a few good data papers:
https://t.co/A3YehnvwQa
https://t.co/rGTIpRv9G8
https://t.co/kEjul1C5Ei

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

come chat to Jakub Adamek, @anianruoss, and me at the poster

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

if you're at #icml2025, come check out our spotlight poster on "Mastering Board Games by External and Internal Planning with Language Models" ♟️

📜: https://t.co/Ro4FhZFULh
⏲️: Wed 16 Jul 11 am - 1:30 pm PDT
📍: East Exhibition Hall A-B #E-2508
demo: https://t.co/jGISrpY8cq

[Petar Veličković @PetarV_93]

Poster Spotlight! 🔦

Mastering Board Games by External and Internal Planning with Language Models ♟️

https://t.co/46CYU2w64W

On Wednesday (Poster Session 3 East)

Presented by Jakub Adamek and @ericmalmi

[Arena.ai @arena]

🚨Breaking: New Gemini-2.5-Pro (06-05) takes the #1 spot across all Arenas again!

🥇 #1 in Text, Vision, WebDev
🥇 #1 in Hard, Coding, Math, Creative, Multi-turn, Instruction Following, and Long Queries categories

Huge congrats @GoogleDeepMind!

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

thank you for the recognition @GaryMarcus!

there's room for improvement, but I find it quite remarkable that an LLM learns to play creative sacrifices like this (best move according to Stockfish)

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

@cfchabris @ericmalmi has kind of done that and it does pretty well except in weird positions - where it still sometimes make illegal moves.

Confirming your conjecture and mine, if I understand his results correctly.

https://t.co/a7omX7bDZl

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

@GaryMarcus @RepresenterTh you're welcome to test the MAV model (w/o MCTS) at: https://t.co/jGISrpXAmS

a few things to note:
* for now, comments come from a different model so they can be ungrounded
* MAV can play chess960, Hex, Connect4, but the Gem only supports chess

[Arena.ai @arena]

🚨Breaking: @GoogleDeepMind’s latest Gemini-2.5-Pro is now ranked #1 across all LMArena leaderboards 🏆

Highlights:
- #1 in all text arenas (Coding, Style Control, Creative Writing, etc)
- #1 on the Vision leaderboard with a ~70 pts lead!
- #1 on WebDev Arena, surpassing Claude for the first time

This is the first-ever sweep across text, vision, and WebDev by any model!🥇

Huge congrats to @GoogleDeepMind on this incredible breakthrough!

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

@LaatoSamuli @anianruoss Thanks, Samuli!

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

multiple long-time dreams coming true at once:
✅ give a talk at NeurIPS
♟️ play chess on a stage
🤡 make my international debut as a rapper

thanks to the audience for a lively discussion that went on for a good hour after the talk and to my amazing co-presenters @anianruoss @weballergy @MatejJusup!

[Google Gemini @GeminiApp]

Think you can outsmart Gemini? We challenge you to a chess match!

Play Gemini in a game of chess with our newest Gem: Chess champ. Explore different openings as you banter back and forth with Gemini. Available in the Gemini web app.

♟️Can you beat it? → https://t.co/2M1GyJcRNL

[Eric Malmi @ericmalmi]

@Bayesprof Thanks for joining!