Thomas Dietterich
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Thomas Dietterich
@tdietterich.bsky.social
7.6K followers 490 following 940 posts
Safe and robust AI/ML, computational sustainability. Former President AAAI and IMLS. Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Oregon State University. https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~tgd/
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@wyden.senate.gov #nokings
Justice on the Benton County Courthouse Keeping Corvallis Weird A tiny bit of the big crowd in Corvallis
October 18, 2025 at 7:37 PM
Beautifully succinct statement of the core problem with the blind application of statistical learning in AI!!
A model trained with a frequentist objective using i.i.d. observational train and validation data is almost surely converging to the non-causal model of the underlying data generating process. That is because using short cuts/spurious correlations leads to a lower loss than not, i.e. you are actually specifically incentivizing your model not to be causal. "Emergence" believers' core fallacy is the assumption the causal model would have the lowest error, and therefore better optimization would eventually converge to the causal model. The opposite is true - the best scoring model (per frequentist objective) is actually the one that is best at exploiting spurious correlations.
July 20, 2025 at 8:46 PM
Throughout the 2924-25 season, the Met continues to honor Ukraine and its brave citizens as they fight to defend their country and its cultural heritage. Tonight’s performance will be preceded by the Ukrainian National Anthem.
March 4, 2025 at 12:42 AM
ArXiv continues to grow. Here is the year-on-year comparison for the categories with 1000+ submissions. Overall, 17% growth in submissions from 2023 to 2024 (208,493 -> 244,031)
Bar graph showing cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.CL, quant-ph, cs.RO are the top 5 categories and they have grown 27%, 23%, 43%, 16%, and 33% in 2024 over 2023. Other high-growth categories include cs.AI (48%), cs.CR (34%), cs.HC (56%), cs.SE (38%), cs.IR (31%) and cs.CY (48%). cs.CV had about 24000 submissions in 2024
January 6, 2025 at 4:21 AM
Posters I wanted to see at NeurIPS
Blank poster board Empty poster board Empty poster board
December 13, 2024 at 10:39 PM
Excellent and thought-provoking article
There’s a kind of emptiness in transhumanism in that it doesn’t know what we’ve got to wish for, it just wishes for the power to create something else — to create freedom from our bodies, from death, from our limitations. But it’s always freedom from, but never freedom for. Freedom for what? What is the positive vision that we want to move toward?
December 1, 2024 at 7:31 PM
From Frank Bruni in NYTimes. (I was thinking similar thoughts as I waited in the BOS airport to fill my small water bottle. One of the people in front of me was filling a one gallon water bottle.)
What’s most remarkable about my students isn’t their wokeness or pre-professionalism. It’s their sogginess. They drink water constantly. They carry water everywhere. If the young people who fought in World War II were the Greatest Generation, the young people pursuing their bachelor’s degrees today are the Moistest one. They live on the cusp of some imagined desert, beside an oasis that’s their last call.
November 22, 2024 at 1:21 AM
Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #1,178,807!
i.e., Not an early adopter. And when I first signed on, nothing seemed to be happening, so I disappeared and only recently came back. Now, it seems we are starting to build a decent AI/ML community (in both senses of the word).
September 18, 2024 at 11:42 PM