Kevin Markham

Founder of Data School

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

⏰ Final day to save 50% on "Modern scikit-learn"

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#Python

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

🚀 LAUNCH SALE: "Modern scikit-learn" (save 50%)

In this course, you'll get up-to-speed with @scikit_learn 1.0 (and beyond) in about an hour!

Enroll here for $9: https://t.co/L3ppfsSQUy

#Python #MachineLearning

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

Launching a NEW course on Monday... want to guess the topic? 🤔

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field.

I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so.

First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world.

The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability.

Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended.

I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent.

Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.)

Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.

Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building.

[Original text (with links): https://t.co/jni2tWazAH ]

[Gabriel Olson @Gabriel_Olson]

DuckTales premiered 39 years ago today.
I loved that show. Not for the gold. For the idea that adventure meant going somewhere wild with people you love.

It was Indiana Jones for kids.

Nobody's making the movie, so I made the trailer. Sound on. 🦆

[David Bellamy @DavidRBellamy]

I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands.

And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

I can't get enough of this family of illusions (not least because it took me so long to figure out how they work).

[SemiAnalysis @SemiAnalysis_]

Recently, we purchased one of each Anthropic/OpenAI subscription plan and randomly ran long horizon coding tasks until we exhausted the weekly limit. It's widely believed that a $200/month plan maxes out at ~$2000/month worth of tokens (assuming API pricing). However, we found that the subscriptions are actually far more generous. (2/4)

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

Is Machine Learning still worth learning in 2026?

Or should you just rely on an LLM?

My take: https://t.co/WFY0w671U3

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

@Afeez_Olad I do offer a video course that covers the same material as the book: https://t.co/5hyyHxkAkH

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

Anyone have a personal contact at a bootcamp or university where they teach #MachineLearning using #Python? I'd love to talk with them about incorporating my book into their curriculum!

Feel free DM me their contact info 🙏

Read the book online (free!): https://t.co/igMm6Nfb3i

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

Floored by the response to my new #Python #MachineLearning book 🤩

Paperback: https://t.co/SuRVz8x6Ud

Ebook: https://t.co/UI7uHxONaS

Read online (free!): https://t.co/igMm6Nfb3i

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

My book is the #1 New Release in NLP! 🥳

Amazon US put it on sale... for $0.95 off 😂

Get the paperback: https://t.co/SuRVz8x6Ud

Or read online (free!): https://t.co/igMm6Nfb3i

#MachineLearning #Python

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

@lindaburson7487 Thank you! I wrote about the cover design here: https://t.co/Ta3NM97ylE

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

My book is the #1 New Release in NLP! 🥳

Amazon US put it on sale... for $0.95 off 😂

Get the paperback: https://t.co/SuRVz8x6Ud

Or read online (free!): https://t.co/igMm6Nfb3i

#MachineLearning #Python

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

@DistriFin Quick update: I'm working with a printer to make the paperback available in India! Enter your email address here if you want to know when it's available: https://t.co/XojPPFalxU

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

Absolutely thrilled that my book is finally published! 🎉

Paperback: https://t.co/qGvoghHKCs
ebook: https://t.co/UI7uHxONaS
Read online: https://t.co/7Nb4USsr4t

Poured my heart & soul into this for 5+ years

Hopefully I sell a few copies even though you can read it for free 😂

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

@DistriFin Thanks so much for your interest! Unfortunately, Amazon does not have a printing facility in India, and so the paperback won't be available there unless a third party resells them. However, I do offer it as an ebook: https://t.co/UI7uHxONaS

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

@AllesistKode Thank you!

[Kevin Markham @justmarkham]

@Asheswari_Swain Thank you!