kgcentral

International Nemawashi / all tweets and RTs in a personal capacity, not official / 🇧🇩 🇬🇭 🇮🇳 🇫🇷 🇺🇳

[kgcentral @kgcentral]

Philosophy: enjoy life because you are dead much longer than you are alive!

[Michael Kugelman @MichaelKugelman]

Pakistan and Afghanistan have agreed to a temporary Eid truce. But escalation dynamics and the failures of mediation complicate any potential steps toward deescalation.
This week for ⁦@ForeignPolicy⁩ on the overlooked conflict on Iran’s doorstep. https://t.co/F8wWwxWwze

[UmdarTamker @UmdarTamker]

Dubai 😭😭😭
#Iran #Israel #Tehran

[Husain Haqqani @husainhaqqani]

‘Suicide bomber kills at least 31 in Islamabad mosque attack.’ @CNN report.
https://t.co/1Eq9GjzfsB

[The Diplomat @Diplomat_APAC]

How did India lose its standing in Washington? And how did Pakistan gain ground so quickly? https://t.co/SJSRww79sW

[Adeel Raja @adeelraja]

Defence Minister Khawaja Asif just inaugurated a fake Pizza Hut outlet in Sialkot 😃

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

CNN now reports the device linked to Havana Syndrome was purchased by Homeland Security in the waning days of the Biden administration. And DoD has spent a year testing it. It has Russian components and fits in a backpack. https://t.co/rSmKdAHid5

[kgcentral @kgcentral]

@ZafarSobhan @DrAkhilX Likely @lalecheleague

[DaVinci @BiancoDavinci]

An Italian sculptor held a personal exhibition of ice blocks entitled:
"Life is short, enjoy it before it melts..."

[Mouad @nadzi_mouad]

Okay so I need to talk about what’s happening with Yann LeCun because this is genuinely one of the wildest exits I’ve ever seen in tech.

For those who don’t know—LeCun is one of the “godfathers of AI.” Not a marketing title. The man literally won the Turing Award (basically the Nobel Prize of computer science) for helping invent deep learning. He’s been at Meta for over a decade as their Chief AI Scientist. An absolute legend.
So here’s what happened.

Zuckerberg got frustrated. Llama wasn’t moving fast enough. The AI race was heating up and Meta felt like it was falling behind. So what does Zuck do? He drops $14 BILLION on Scale AI and hires its 28-year-old co-founder, Alexandr Wang, to run a brand new “Superintelligence Lab.”

And then—and this is the part that still blows my mind—he makes Wang… LeCun’s boss.

Think about that for a second. A 65-year-old Turing Award winner. Four decades of groundbreaking research. The guy who helped BUILD this entire field. Now reporting to someone whose company… labels data. (Scale AI is impressive, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t actually build AI models. They annotate training data for other companies.)
LeCun just did an interview with the Financial Times and honestly? He chose violence.

Called Wang “young” and “inexperienced.” Said he has “no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher.”

And then dropped this absolute gem: “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”

I mean. The man said what he said.

But wait—it gets better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it.

LeCun straight up confirmed that Meta’s team “fudged” the Llama 4 benchmark results. Like, actually manipulated them. Used different models on different tests to make the numbers look better. Remember when everyone was suspicious about those benchmarks back in April? Yeah. Turns out they were right to be.

Apparently Zuckerberg was furious when this came out internally. LeCun says he “lost confidence in everyone who was involved” and basically sidelined the entire GenAI team.

And here’s the thing that really gets me—LeCun has been saying for YEARS that LLMs are a “dead end.” That you can’t get to real intelligence just by predicting the next word. That we need “world models” that actually understand physical reality, not just language patterns.

Everyone at Meta wanted him to stop saying this publicly. Bad for the narrative, you know? But LeCun refused.

His exact words: “I’m not gonna change my mind because some dude thinks I’m wrong. I’m not wrong.”

That’s not arrogance. That’s a scientist who’s seen enough hype cycles to know when something doesn’t add up.

So now he’s out. Launching his own company called AMI Labs—Advanced Machine Intelligence. They’re targeting a $3 billion valuation. Building those world models he’s been talking about. Says he’ll have a “baby version” ready within a year.
Oh, and apparently French President Macron personally texted him after the news dropped. LeCun won’t say what the message said but like… the man is getting DMs from heads of state now.

I don’t know if LeCun is right about everything. Maybe LLMs will surprise us. Maybe Meta will figure it out. But when one of the three people who literally invented modern AI walks out the door saying your entire strategy is fundamentally flawed?
I don’t know man. I’d at least ask some questions.

The AI wars just got very, very interesting

[BILAL SARWARY @bsarwary]

In Afghanistan, even fashion has consequences. This week, four young men from Herat were arrested by the Taliban for the unforgivable crime of dressing like Thomas Shelby from Peaky Blinders. No weapons, no gang warfare. Only flat caps and long coats proving far too threatening for the Ministry of Virtue of Taliban.

For a few weeks, these “Herati Shelbys” brought harmless excitement to the city. People took selfies with them, children admired them, and for a brief moment, the historic city of Herat looked like a place where youth could express themselves without fear. That illusion didn’t last long.

Their arrest is funny and absurd at the same time. Tragic because it captures the reality of life in Afghanistan today. A place where creativity is criminalised. Hope is suspicious. And the four boys mimicking a TV character can somehow become a national security priority.

[Responsible Statecraft @RStatecraft]

NEW @MartinDiCaro on Philip & William Taubman's new bio on Robert McNamara, which looks into the psychology of the Vietnam war era defense secretary and finds a ghost. https://t.co/dfkk0PEQQV

[kgcentral @kgcentral]

TAX THE POPE
https://t.co/NxSfgPR71u

[Anthony Bonato @Anthony_Bonato]

Real-life Fourier series

[Saganism @Saganismm]

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.

Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous, not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years.

That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday.

I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

- Ann Druyan

[kgcentral @kgcentral]

Enya for Applebees?
Srsly - are we doing this?! 😂

[Istra of Glome @byistra]

C.S. Lewis, the dangers of the internet (before it existed)

[kgcentral @kgcentral]

You don't want to hear my airline experiences

[🤬Swearing Kids 𝕏 🙇‍♀️🙇‍♂️ @SwearingKids]

Chewie knew

[kgcentral @kgcentral]

@Avis rented me a car with expired registration -- no one can fix it and the police threatening to tow the rental