Horia Cucu

Associate Professor @ University Politehnica of Bucharest; Spoken Language Technology

[Daractenus @Daractenus]

Video shows Kimberly Guilfoyle, US ambassador to Greece and former fiancee of Trump Jr. meeting privately with the leaders of Romania's Social Democratic Party on March 31st, in a Bucharest hotel.

Just 6 Days later, the Social Democrats allied with the pro-Russian extremists from AUR and filled the motion that collapsed the Romanian government led by PM Bolojan, which strongly opposed purchasing US gas at above market prices.

In a WSJ article yesterday, sources present at a meeting between a Greek minister and Guilfoyle stated she bragged about having collapsed the RO government for its refusal to buy US gas, warning the US can do the same in Greece.

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

Given Trump’s Easter threats to carry out new war crimes in Iran, we should think one or two steps ahead about a coup attempt connected to the war. And then deter it. (1/17)

[Radu Hossu 🇹🇩🇺🇦 @RaduHossu]

I want a United States of Europe!

Europe is our home and our only chance to live in a society governed by liberal values and principles, which have been the foundation of Western civilization. Europe is home to the 5 million Romanians who left their country in search of a better life. Europe is where we go on vacation. Europe is the cradle of democracy. Europe is our family.

Yes, America saved us at least twice in the last hundred-odd years. And I, as a simple citizen of Romania, part of Europe, will forever be grateful to the memory of the hegemon that gave me the opportunity to dream of a perpetually better life when I was a child. But today, those who make decisions on behalf of America no longer have anything in common with the American dream (my dream), with the values promoted by America, or even with their anthem, "land of the brave, home of the free."

Today, right now, those who lead America have turned their guns on our home, Europe, extending a huge helping hand to our greatest enemy, Russia. The morally decaying hegemon, convinced by the spells of the criminal from the East, is ready to tear down our home.

They want to convince the confused and those bent on betrayal that a "Europe of nations" is what we need. No! A Europe of nations means a fragmented Europe, devoid of political and economic bargaining power. It means a fragmented Europe. It means the end of the last structure that imperfectly and bureaucratically, clumsily and awkwardly protects people first and then profits. I don't want that.

Europe is the one that wants to regulate AI. The one that wants to regulate social media. The one that fines American giants for violating our rights. It is Europe that puts a stop to harmful food imports from America, has a much lower crime rate than America and a much higher standard of living. It is Europe that cannot understand how there can be no free education or free healthcare. Yes, it is not perfect, and that should come as no surprise to anyone, because rivers of blood have flowed here for thousands of years. For pride, for territory, for wealth, for political games, for the dreams of psychopaths. But there has been peace since the European Union was created.

The European Union has been the most important guarantor of human progress in our home. Now is the time for European leaders, including those in Romania, to correctly analyze the signals of struggle against us and to act quickly towards an even stronger Union. Towards the United States of Europe!

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

Alright, I guess it falls to me -- just an ordinary guy from Ukrainian Donbas -- to explain a few obvious things to a New York real-estate developer who seems to care a lot more about the “commercial opportunities” being dangled in front of him by Putin and his mob fixer Kirill Dmitriev than about Ukraine, this region, or the questions of war, life, and death for millions of people whose fate he so casually talks about.

You see, real life is a bit more complicated than a primitive two-color map where Ukrainian regions are divided into “Ukrainian-speaking” and “Russian-speaking.”

Believe it or not, speaking Russian in everyday life does not mean wanting to live under Russian rule and the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.

It doesn’t mean you’re somehow “by default” obliged to belong to Russia or serve the imperial whims of Vladimir Putin.

Especially not after the 2014 invasion -- and especially not after the slaughter that the business partners in the Kremlin unleashed on what is now an almost completely destroyed Donbas.

That horror opened countless eyes and finally shattered many illusions about what the so-called “Russian world” really is -- a plague, bringing death and cemeteries among the ruins of once-prosperous cities like Mariupol and Bakhmut.

You might be surprised, but back in 2014 the main centers for forming “volunteer battalions” were not Lviv or Ternopil -- they were “Russian-speaking” cities like Dnipro and Kharkiv.

They created and filled numerous famed units made up of local residents who took up arms to repel Russia’s hybrid invasion of Donbas when the regular army and the state were in collapse and paralysis.

That’s because we, the “Russian-speaking” Ukrainians, already understood perfectly well what was happening -- and made our final, irreversible choice in favor of Ukraine.

You might be surprised again, but when business partners in the Kremlin, through collaborators, saboteurs, and unmarked Russian regular forces, occupied Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014–2015, the majority of the region’s educated, entrepreneurial, and democratic-minded population fled those “people’s republics,” which quickly turned into depressed criminal cesspools.

They left their homes and apartments and moved -- believe it or not -- to areas under Ukrainian control: to Kyiv, and to its peaceful suburbs like Irpin and Bucha (where I live), where so many of our fellow Donetsk natives started new lives from scratch.

And here’s a little hint for the self-proclaimed “experts” and “journalists”: even in Donbas, pro-Russian Russian-speaking people never identified themselves as “ethnic Russians” -- only as Ukrainians who just happened to speak Russian.

No matter what years of Russian war propaganda tried to claim about the “Russians in Donbas.”

If you think you know better than me -- someone born in Volnovakha, who grew up and lived there most of his life -- you’re mistaken.

And believe it or not, even now, in the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale slaughter in the so-called “Russian-speaking regions,” masses of Russian-speaking Ukrainians have fled and settled in Kyiv, Lviv, or Chernivtsi -- something you can easily notice just by walking through those cities.

I won’t even start on how many “Russian-speaking” Ukrainians are fighting right now in the Ukrainian army on the front lines against the Russian plague that came to their land.

Why is that?

Because we have long been part of the Ukrainian nation -- part of its political and cultural space.

Our capital is ancient Kyiv, not Moscow.

We argue about and criticize Ukrainian politicians whose decisions shape our lives.

We took part in the revolutions, the elections, the wars for this country.

We cheer for the Ukrainian football team, for Ukrainian singers at Eurovision.

Most of us, one way or another, see Ukraine as our country and our future — and today, more than ever in modern history, we are farther from Russian cultural space and closer to our fellow Ukrainians from Lviv, Lutsk, Ternopil, and Vinnytsia than ever before.

That’s called shared national values.

The democratic, European, and Euro-Atlantic Ukraine that is fighting for its survival and freedom against an imperial invader -- the Ukraine we’ve been trying for a decade to reform and make a better place to live -- that’s us.

That’s who we are. That’s what we believe in, and what matches our values and vision of the future.

And many of us from the “Russian-speaking regions” have already switched to Ukrainian in daily life and in public, returning to the embrace of Ukrainian culture and tradition -- and rejecting “Russian” with disgust and anger, because we don’t want to have anything in common with the fascist Russia of today, which brings only bloodlust, war, hatred, chauvinism, aggression, and the deceitful hypocrisy of its brainwashing television propaganda.

And frankly -- until our last breath -- we will want nothing to do with your Russia.

After all it has done -- killing our friends and relatives, taking our homes, and turning our “Russian-speaking cities” into vast cemeteries amid ruins where life will never return.

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

Any American medium that fails to cover the largest protests in American history is failing in the basic mission of informing the public about the facts.
#NoKings

[Radu Hossu 🇹🇩🇺🇦 @RaduHossu]

Romania:

On September 13, 2025, a drone violates Romanian airspace for 50 minutes. On the same day, President Zelenskyy publicly comments on the event, saying that this is how Russia acts, taking small steps at first, following a well-established plan.

The Romanian press picks up the story, using Zelenskyy's statement in the headline. At the same time, I analyzed the first 100 comments on the news posted by Digi24 on Facebook, an analysis that was later widely commented on in the national press. For those who did not read it at the time, I will repeat the key points: 7/

[Radu Hossu 🇹🇩🇺🇦 @RaduHossu]

Romania and Poland were simultaneously attacked by Russia last month

Poland:

On the night of September 9-10, 2025, Poland's airspace was illegally invaded by over 20 Russian drones. At the same time, without us realizing it, our minds were being invaded by a tsunami of Russian disinformation.

Over 200,000 messages spreading Russian propaganda (posts, comments, messages) invaded the minds of Poles, says Michał Fedorowicz, president of a Polish analysis organization, ResFortuna. The most important message was "the drones were Ukrainian"/"it was Ukraine's fault"/"Ukraine is to blame"; 1/

[AlphaCephei @alphacep]

Interesting thing in 11labs synthesis - first few words in the start of the phrase are systematically slow, then it becomes faster. Easy to build classifier to detect this behavior.

https://t.co/Jbo9QryVU7

[Horia Cucu @horiacucu]

@kyutai_labs Is the TTS model for English only, or was it trained on a multilingual dataset?

[Horia Cucu @horiacucu]

#AI4TRUST TWITTER CHAT | AI in the fight against disinformation https://t.co/gMiWDNJusH

[Gabrielius Landsbergis🇱🇹 @GLandsbergis]

Once again I am leaving the Munich Security Conference in a low mood. Amongst all the noise, the US signalled their plans for Europe, so things are becoming clearer. But things are clearly not good.
This is what we now know, and what we now have to do about it:🧵1/17

[Horia Cucu @horiacucu]

@abursuc @valeoai Onsite or also remote?

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

⚡️ Excited to share that I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.
The announcement:

---
We are Eureka Labs and we are building a new kind of school that is AI native.

How can we approach an ideal experience for learning something new? For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world's languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand.

However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them. This Teacher + AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform. If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything, expanding education in both reach (a large number of people learning something) and extent (any one person learning a large amount of subjects, beyond what may be possible today unassisted).

Our first product will be the world's obviously best AI course, LLM101n. This is an undergraduate-level class that guides the student through training their own AI, very similar to a smaller version of the AI Teaching Assistant itself. The course materials will be available online, but we also plan to run both digital and physical cohorts of people going through it together.

Today, we are heads down building LLM101n, but we look forward to a future where AI is a key technology for increasing human potential. What would you like to learn?
---

@EurekaLabsAI is the culmination of my passion in both AI and education over ~2 decades. My interest in education took me from YouTube tutorials on Rubik's cubes to starting CS231n at Stanford, to my more recent Zero-to-Hero AI series. While my work in AI took me from academic research at Stanford to real-world products at Tesla and AGI research at OpenAI. All of my work combining the two so far has only been part-time, as side quests to my "real job", so I am quite excited to dive in and build something great, professionally and full-time.

It's still early days but I wanted to announce the company so that I can build publicly instead of keeping a secret that isn't. Outbound links with a bit more info in the reply!

[Horia Cucu @horiacucu]

Nice work by Rishabh Jain on child speech recognition :-)

[C3I_NUIG @C3I_NUIG]

Congratulations @rishabh_jain16 on your paper "A Wav2Vec2-Based Experimental Study On Self-Supervised Learning Methods To Improve Child Speech Recognition" acceptance for publication in @IEEEAccess. https://t.co/c2AslfigUh @pcor @horiacucu @HJavidnia @galwayeee @Muhamma59397356

[Horia Cucu @horiacucu]

@C3I_NUIG @rishabh_jain16 @IEEEAccess @pcor @HJavidnia @galwayeee @Muhamma59397356 Congrats Rishabh!

[Horia Cucu @horiacucu]

@TanelAlumae @Vocapia Congrats!

[Horia Cucu @horiacucu]

I am pleased to let you know that our article "Automated Circuit Sizing with Multi-objective Optimization based on Differential Evolution and Bayesian Inference" is now available online.

Many thanks to the whole team for the great work!

https://t.co/MYi7s63mX6

[Marvin Lavechin @LavechinMarvin]

If you ever need to detect audio segments that have been recorded in noisy or reverberant environments, Brouhaha might be worth checking!

🎙️🥁🚨🔊

https://t.co/j9XoIzSe4q
https://t.co/YlozVfDI3m

Submission to #ICASSP2023 co-authored with Marianne Métais led by @hbredin

🧵⬇️

[Arvydas Anušauskas @a_anusauskas]

It is UNBELIEVABLE but 🇹🇷 just agreed to give the Bayraktar that 🇱🇹gathered money for, ❗️FOR FREE❗️. It is amazing! For the gathered money we will buy the needed ammunition for the Bayraktar and the rest of money will also go for support of 🇺🇦. Thank you Türkiye! 🇹🇷🇱🇹🇺🇦

[Peter Corcoran @pcor]

A Text-to-Speech Pipeline, Evaluation Methodology, and Initial Fine-tuning Results for Child Speech Synthesis, from @rishabh_jain16 the full open-access manuscript is available here: https://t.co/jSDLeaVPZ0