Abdoulaye Diack
banner
diack.bsky.social
Abdoulaye Diack
@diack.bsky.social
Program Manager ML & AI @ Google Research | Ex-Google Brain. Speaker (FR/EN)

Abdoulaye.ai

Opinions are my own. He/His
A lot of my retweets and likes are for bookmarking purposes.

🌍 Accra, Ghana

(cover photo: Dar Es Saalam, circa 2015)
Pinned
We recently published an open source dataset of building footprints and height estimations for the Global South. It covers ~2 billion buildings and 8 years of data derived from Sentinel 2 imagery.

Blog: shorturl.at/S8ejc
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2310.11622
Dataset: shorturl.at/FHuQE
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
This baby zebra was born in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve with spots instead of stripes. It also might finally put to bed the age-old question of whether zebras are white with black stripes or black with white stripes.
This Baby Zebra Was Born With Spots Instead Of Stripes - TVovermind
A rare polka dot baby zebra was spotted (pun intended) in Kenya, and the internet is going wild. The animal has already captured many a heart (ours included), and photos of the adorable creature have ...
tvovermind.com
November 14, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Can't tell you how great it is to finally be able to release and talk about this work, SIMA 2, the next step toward embodied intelligence in rich, interactive 3D worlds!

deepmind.google/sima
SIMA 2: A Gemini-Powered AI Agent for 3D Virtual Worlds
Introducing SIMA 2, the next milestone in our research creating general and helpful AI agents. By integrating the advanced capabilities of our Gemini models, SIMA is evolving from an instruction-foll…
deepmind.google
November 13, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Bold claim from my car hailing service
November 13, 2025 at 7:49 AM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
We are proud to announce that we trained 1.5B, 8B, and 24B generative language models from scratch on 2 to 4 tera-tokens of carefully curated, high-quality data covering French, English and code. We release our models and code under open-source licences. Thread👇
November 12, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Space DJ turns genre embeddings into a playable galaxy—pilot a ship, the music follows. 🚀

Key stats
768→128 PCA compression; 3D UMAP projection; three.js rendering; autopilot drift; high‑dim neighbors surfacing hidden similarities.
November 11, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Farewell to one of brightest stars of the golden age of Japanese cinema: Nakadai Tatsuya, who starred in some of history's greatest films, has passed away at the age of 92. Major roles included those in Ran, Hara Kiri, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Kagemusha, The Human Condition, and many more.
November 11, 2025 at 1:20 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Minisforum just launched their first Arm workstation, the MS-R1.

12-core CPU, Arm Mali G720 iGPU, 64 GB of RAM, NVMe, U.2, and PCIe expansion, and a lot more. It's a whole Arm Homelab in a box!
November 10, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Breaking: we release a fully synthetic generalist dataset for pretraining, SYNTH and two new SOTA reasoning models exclusively trained on it. Despite having seen only 200 billion tokens, Baguettotron is currently best-in-class in its size range. pleias.fr/blog/blogsyn...
November 10, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
‼️ Major update to the #ACEZero code base. We added the capabilities of the #ICCV2025 paper on Scene Coordinate Reconstruction Priors.

Gives you, e.g., a RGB-D version of ACE0. In the snipped below, I jointly reconstruct multiple RGB-D scans of ScanNet.

github.com/nianticlabs/...
November 10, 2025 at 9:49 AM
Whoa now forecast to make landfall as a CAT 4!
November 9, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
I don’t know much about this channel, but this short video of teaching an octopus is very moving youtu.be/PcWnQ7fYzwI?...
I taught an octopus piano (It took 6 months)
YouTube video by Mattias Krantz
youtu.be
November 8, 2025 at 6:17 AM
According to Weatherlab Typhoon Fung-wong (Uwan) is now forecast to hit the Baler Bay area tomorrow as CAT3. Cities like Baler, San Jose City, and Baguio remain on its path.
Official PAGASA bulletin: www.pagasa.dost.gov.ph/tropical-cyc...
Weatherlab: deepmind.google.com/science/go/X...
November 8, 2025 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Today’s satellite view of Typhoon Uwan as it draws closer to the Philippines. Winds are 165 km/h and strengthening. #UwanPH #Fungwong
November 8, 2025 at 9:26 AM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Though the storm is still outside the Philippine Area of Responsibility, PAGASA has preemptively given (Severe) Tropical Storm Fung-wong the local name Uwan and raised Wind Signal 1 for a large swath of eastern Visayas and southern Luzon. This one is being taken extremely seriously.
PAGASA gives Fung-wong local name Uwan even before entry into PAR
Severe Tropical Storm Fung-wong gets its local name Uwan early as PAGASA raises Signal No. 1 for portions of Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao on Friday afternoon, November 7
www.rappler.com
November 7, 2025 at 12:08 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Gemma3n was released a few months ago, I wasn't able to find more info and I found it a *very interesting* architecture with a lot of innovations (Matryoshka Transformer, MobileNetV5, etc), so I decided to dig further, here you are the slides of this talk: drive.google.com/file/d/15hbh...
November 7, 2025 at 2:05 PM
Seeing so many new and unknown Chinese EVs on the road must mean they've reached an attractive price point..
November 7, 2025 at 4:38 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
🎉 ICML 2026 Call for Papers (& Position Papers) is here! 🎉

📅 Key Dates
Abstract deadline: Jan 23, 2026 AOE
Paper deadline: Jan 28, 2026 AOE

A few key changes this year:
- Attendance for authors of accepted papers is optional
- Originally submitted version of accepted papers will be made public
...
November 7, 2025 at 2:42 PM
Sharing work from my colleagues on forecasting deforestation risks.

research.google/blog/forecas...

Paper: eartharxiv.org/repository/v...

South East Asia dataset: console.cloud.google.com/storage/brow...

Notebook to load the data: gist.github.com/ovolve/9b86c...
November 7, 2025 at 12:35 PM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Not content with holding title to one of the harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the world, Uganda’s parliament to consider new bill would send people to prison for 10 years for identifying as LGBTQ+.
New bill would send people to prison for 10 years for identifying as LGBTQ+ in Uganda - LGBTQ Nation
"This is the time you are going to show us whether you’re a homo or you’re not," one lawmaker said in support of the bill.
www.lgbtqnation.com
November 7, 2025 at 9:24 AM
Perfect timing to go for a run.
November 7, 2025 at 7:52 AM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Meet Anny, our Free (Apache 2.0) and Interpretable Human Body Model for all ages.
Anny is built upon #MakeHuman and enables achieving SOTA performance in Human Mesh Recovery.
ArXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2511.03589
Demo: anny-demo.europe.naverlabs.com
Code: github.com/naver/anny
November 6, 2025 at 10:59 AM
Reposted by Abdoulaye Diack
Australia has so much electricity from solar power that it is going to start offering free electricity to everyone for at least three hours during the day as the wholesale price of power goes negative

electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...
Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
Australia's extensive solar power penetration makes so much energy that the government wants to offer free electricity at peak hours.
electrek.co
November 6, 2025 at 4:58 AM
Kalmaegi makes landfall today in central Vietnam.
deepmind.google.com/science/go/m...
November 6, 2025 at 8:48 AM
11 years ago: "Fung-Wong is expected to leave Philippine territory by Sunday and track toward Taiwan and southern Japan.

Typhoon Kalmaegi hit the same northern Philippine region last week, leaving eight people dead and displacing more than 366,000."
www.theguardian.com/world/2014/s...
Philippines evacuates thousands as tropical storm Fung-Wong hits
Storm brings 60mph winds and extensive flooding to Manila and the northern and central provinces of Luzon island
www.theguardian.com
November 5, 2025 at 11:35 PM