Ramesh Sridharan

ML Lead @manifold_ai | Lecturer @UCBerkeley | Formerly @MIT_CSAIL
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Machine learning | Data science | Education | Food
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Likes/RTs ≠ endorsements | he/his

[🍉 Abubakar Abid @abidlabs]

One point that is not often discussed with closed AI platforms is that they are often “system prompt-ed for engagement” — in other words, they’ll ask follow up questions which are designed to keep users chatting with AI, analogous to Netflix’s “watch next” button.

Wastes time and emissions, and is another reason to use open-source models which don’t seem to suffer from this. See ChatGPT on the left vs. HuggingChat running Qwen 3 on the right.

[Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran]

The entire archive of all CDC datasets uploaded before January 28th, 2025 has been backed up on Internet Archive.

Incredible work everyone. Science will never be silenced!

[Prem Thakker @prem_thakker]

Rashida Tlaib won, outpacing Harris by 39 points in Dearborn.
Two women, including a Black woman, running for Michigan state Supreme Court won.
Sexism and racism may have played a role in Kamala Harris losing, but it is evidently an insufficient explanation.

[Logan M. Davis @LoganMDavis]

A question Gallup asked in 1961, about what has been remembered as one of the most iconic and effective protest movements in American history.

[zeynep tufekci @zeynep]

I *totally* disagree with this framing of tech criticism or analyses of harms as pessimism. Critics are the realists, & we lean optimist because criticism is an effort to improve. "Let's focus on the positive" isn't optimism: it's resignation to harms—and thus quite pessimistic.

[MMitchell @mmitchell_ai]

Okay. Inspired by news & @stealcase, let me clarify something.
When AI companies release "open training data" for a model, they're generally sharing *fine-tuning* data. The big issues w data and consent are NOT of this type. The issues are with the MAIN DATA used in training.🧵

[Suresh Venkatasubramanian (mostly in the sky now) @geomblog]

A 1000x times yes. It's really frustrating.

[Suresh Venkatasubramanian (mostly in the sky now) @geomblog]

Roko's* five stages of AI grief:

1. Denial: "there is no bias in AI systems. Math is not racist."

I feel like we have largely moved on from this stage, thanks to all the reporting we've had over the years.

* the basilisk will always be with you

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Reading up on the SVB situation and how FDIC operates -- the TL;DR is that the bank will reopen on Monday and folks will be able to withdraw up to $250k + some fraction of the remaining balance. Over the next few weeks they will recover 100% (or very close) of their full balance.

[Craig Spencer MD MPH @Craig_A_Spencer]

3 years into the pandemic, it’s incredible to see the revisionism, lamenting how we ‘over-reacted’ to Covid.

In March 2020, many of my patients died every single day. No matter what we did. 4 one shift. 6 the next.

Often more than when I worked in West Africa treating Ebola.

[Paul Mainwood @PaulMainwood]

Beautiful example to reveal the nature of an LLM (a sophisticated statistical model trained on a large corpus of text).

[Paul E Williams @PEWilliams_]

Give your stats professor an aneurysm with this one cool trick

[Katie Mack @AstroKatie]

I made a TikTok to document my superpower of using the ELECTROMAGNETIC FORCE to BEND WATER ⚡️👉🏼⚡️

[Tracy Chou 🌻 @triketora]

my favorite part of twitter is stumbling across the world’s expert in a very niche topic tweet threading an in-depth analysis to the specific questions of the day

[Ramesh Sridharan @tweetsbyramesh]

@WastewaterSCAN your high-resolution wastewater data is amazing! Is there an API or other programmatic way to access the data across multiple regions/pathogens?

[Daniel Kwan @dunkwun]

EEAAO is going to be back in 1400 theaters nationwide tomorrow.

To all of the people who:
-regret missing it in theaters
-fell asleep watching it on an airplane
-accidentally left at “THE END”
-want to hate-watch the film Cats style with your friends

now is your chance!

[✨ Jean Yang ✨ @jeanqasaur]

I loved doing a PhD, but it's not for everybody. Here's my anti-sell:

💡 Grad school isn't about reading papers, it's about doing original research.
🧹 Doing research is less about ideas and more about slogging through the unknown for years.
💸 This is not the lucrative path.

[MMitchell @mmitchell_ai]

In order to understand why ChatGPT can't replace Google Search, it's useful to understand the early days of web search and the role that PageRank played. 1/n