ML+Science. Prev: @UniofOxford, @GoldmanSachs. My opinions are my own. 🇧🇬-🇬🇧 sh/ssh

Oxford, England
Joined December 2014
Incredibly honoured and grateful for this recognition!
We're pleased to reveal the winner of our 3rd #phdprize of the year, this time with @UniofOxford Learn about our winners, why they were chosen from a host of brilliant submissions and more on our PhD prizes, worth up to ÂŁ10,000. eu1.hubs.ly/H09sv3F0
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
Most tax calculators tell you how much tax you pay *now*. Ours also shows how much tax you'll pay on your next £1. Your marginal rate. We'll be publishing straight after the Budget. But here's a preview - I'd love to get feedback. taxpolicy.org.uk/uk-tax-calc

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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
can we plz figure out PMS before inventing superintelligence? ty
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
Jensen Huang has a message for the UK
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
Torn between thinking such international humiliation might be useful to us as it may prompt our cowardly and useless politicians to change course, and also fearing that it simply notifies more people around the world that we are a mug country, ripe for being taken advantage of
The WSJ ridicules the UK over surging disability payments. "The scale of the payouts has become a scandal. No other western country has seen such a rise in disability claims." State subsidised Motability cars for 860k people is only one egregious example. wsj.com/world/uk/united-king

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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
What’s the evidence on rent control? I charted the findings from 112 studies: Great for rent-controlled tenants ✅ But: Pushes up rents for other people ❌ Pushes down new housing construction ❌ Pushes down building quality ❌
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
I think "AI welfare" is morally obscene (given all the human suffering in the world), and will add to the growing anti-AI backlash. AI is a technology that humans created that should be used for our benefit, not a rival species we should be nurturing .
NEW: Dario Amodei has said that AI systems "may be deserving of important rights." Anthropic's top safety researchers argue AI may be "justified in going rogue." Experts at Google and OpenAI worry about a digital "slave trade." So do some government officials. Once relegated to science fiction, the idea of "AI welfare" has become shockingly mainstream at some of the most powerful companies in the world. It is changing the way AI research is conducted and the way models are programmed. And critics say these changes have raised the odds of all kinds of catastrophic scenarios—including the ones these companies are warning about. I spent months investigating the frontier labs and AI "safety" experts seeking to regulate AI. What I found was a profoundly anti-human ideology that would alarm the average citizen and could determine the future of a world-altering technology.đŸ§” freebeacon.com/america/suici

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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Bury your head in the ground at your own risk. I aim to not jump on any hype trains, but since Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.2 + the harnesses it was clear that these things can write code nearly as good as I can in my best language; better in other languages. But we won't see non-devs push production code for a long time; possibly forever, if you ask me. Software still needs to be built in robust ways, and it's our profession to do this well, and use the new tools we have, which create new and interesting (+tough!) challenges
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
Oh look - the people who opposed the Mini-Budget - now calling for tax cuts. AFTER the millionaires have fled and the businesses have closed down.
EXC: Sir Ed Davey backs 10p fuel duty cut in conference interview for tomorrow's ST – Says the Lib Dems will be “increasingly talking about tax cuts” from now on – Hints at more tax cut pledges in Tuesday's speech and says 3p fuel duty rise from January should not go ahead – Tells restive Lib Dem MPs he shares their concerns: “I've never been as frustrated”
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
10 years ago!
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Okay, this is crazy. TMLR editors took the unusual step of inviting authors of a subset of papers before desk rejection to have a Zoom call and answer questions about their papers. Result: only 7 of 10 invited accepted, and 7 out of 7 failed to answer any questions. People are publishing stuff they cannot explain or understand!! medium.com/@TmlrOrg/asking-a

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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
A great read. I have similar feelings about how AI labs approach progress directly and without nurturing of scientific communities & intuition. The math research community went through the transition the fastest, so it was felt most. Other fields next. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/

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The saddest part is that there's probably more funding and research effort in understanding LLMs than understanding female biology/health.
I’ve always been confused by the female experience. I hear what they say, and can conceptually understand what they describe, but I have never been able to internalize the experience myself. Seeing Kate’s biodata has started to make her more legible to me. It’s kind of how we’re trying to understand AI, a field called mechanistic interpretability where you take a black box and find the underlying circuits that explain the behavior. Bridging this gap in understanding could unlock far more empathy, cooperation, and alignment. Remarkably, it seems after 40 days of behavioral consistency (sleep, diet, exercise), her erratic hormonal swings lessened by more than 30% and stabilized.
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works: 1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance. 2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely. According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits. The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024. Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025. And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well. What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)? 3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself. It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one. 4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
Labour won't cut welfare to fund defence.
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
Wrote up my thoughts on the whole OpenAI Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem story, and how it highlights the still confusing question of what using my data "to improve model performance" actually means simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/8

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I left DeepMind after 7 years (and since rejected offers to join the other two) due to severe concerns about the concentration of power these labs represent. What is currently happening in this field is deeply unhealthy for society.
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
EXCLUSIVE: Hedge fund titan Chris Rokos to leave the UK for Greece, the latest exit by one of the country’s top taxpayers and biggest names in finance. He ranked 3rd in the Sunday Times’ latest annual list of top tax payers, with a bill of £330m. bloomberg.com/news/articles/

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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
Not everything has to be looked at through the lens of discrimination. Conservatives managed to choose our first woman leader 51 years ago. Meanwhile Labour are celebrating Andy Burnham as their first female Prime Minister. Claire has been promoted because she is excellent and Conservatives believe in meritocracy. If Harriet is worried about discrimination, there is plenty in her own party to keep her busy. Boris Johnson promoted me to the Treasury while I was on maternity leave in 2020. Nobody did a podcast episode on it because we didn’t think it was remarkable. He just knew I could do the job. Women do not need patronising theories to explain their success. That is the point.
Time was, @ClaireCoutinho, that women had to conceal pregnancy, fearing the sack. We fought against maternity discrimination so that women could be promoted on merit not sacked for pregnancy. I’m glad you’ve escaped mat discrimination. But it’s still a problem. How about siding with us to banish it? @ThenScrewed
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What with "load bearing". I hear this phrasing like 50 times a day now.
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Desi R. Ivanova retweeted
LLMs increase the complexity of codebases. They duplicate methods, write overdefensive code against impossible edge cases, & overoptimize too early. Can further training fix this? Naur's “Programming as Theory Building” says no. -- @pol_avec answer.ai/posts/2026-08-19-l
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