Joseph Halstead
@Josephalstead
Lead Bioinformatician at All Wales Medical Genomics Service.
Honestly the only number that 3 really “owns” is 9. 6 is its own thing, 4 takes 12, 15 is clearly 5 territory, 18 & 24 are in the 6 family, 21 is embedded in 7’s lore, 27 only reminds me of 9 and 30 is obviously a 10 multiple.
Yeah we did exactly that
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
In a joint paper with @OwainEvans_UK as part of the Anthropic Fellows Program, we study a surprising phenomenon: subliminal learning. Language models can transmit their traits to other models, even in what appears to be meaningless data. x.com/OwainEvans_UK/…
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
ahhhh yes good morning let’s open up the Infinite Information River for a nice 20 minutes before getting out of bed or thinking any original thoughts at all
we have signed a deal for an additional 4.5 gigawatts of capacity with oracle as part of stargate. easy to throw around numbers, but this is a _gigantic_ infrastructure project. some progress photos from abilene:
It's mad that the UK has a national AI institute that remains unaligned and unresponsive to national priorities – the government and the EPSRC should act on these recommendations now, rather than waiting for yet another governance review or funding cycle to come round
🚨 NEW REPORT 🚨 The Alan Turing Institute has visibly struggled, and is now at a critical juncture. The Secretary of State has intervened. What happens next? A new report for @britishprogress by me and @jujulemons sets out a plan: 🧵
An advanced version of Gemini with Deep Think has officially achieved gold medal-level performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad. 🥇 It solved 5️⃣ out of 6️⃣ exceptionally difficult problems, involving algebra, combinatorics, geometry and number theory. Here’s how 🧵
1 What concerns me is Britain’s electricity price competitiveness. That Northern Europe will entrench high prices with decades of wind contracts on the assumption of learning curves, modularity, and storage; before realising that wind is not solar.
1. Wind and solar both keep me up at night, but for opposite reasons. Solar works and is winning the global race, Britain simply sits too far north to benefit. Britain is betting on wind instead, yet wind lacks the very traits that makes solar work.
Great thread explaining the huge technical barriers the UK faces on renewables becoming viable. TLDR: just build nuclear.
1. Wind and solar both keep me up at night, but for opposite reasons. Solar works and is winning the global race, Britain simply sits too far north to benefit. Britain is betting on wind instead, yet wind lacks the very traits that makes solar work.
When did people stop moving out the way to let passengers off the train first? This was basic courtesy that my parents drilled into me as a child. Getting off the tube is impossible when met with a wall of people.
This is very impressive - and surprising, at least to me. Worth reading the whole thread.
Today, we at @OpenAI achieved a milestone that many considered years away: gold medal-level performance on the 2025 IMO with a general reasoning LLM—under the same time limits as humans, without tools. As remarkable as that sounds, it’s even more significant than the headline 🧵
A must-read thread. Solar power is amazing. It might very well change the world. But it will not work for Britain and *wind is not solar*.
1. Wind and solar both keep me up at night, but for opposite reasons. Solar works and is winning the global race, Britain simply sits too far north to benefit. Britain is betting on wind instead, yet wind lacks the very traits that makes solar work.
Today, we at @OpenAI achieved a milestone that many considered years away: gold medal-level performance on the 2025 IMO with a general reasoning LLM—under the same time limits as humans, without tools. As remarkable as that sounds, it’s even more significant than the headline 🧵
1/N I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO).
Making planning reform a pillar of your growth strategy and then gutting it would be soooooooo "all pain, no gain"
The most promising remaining part of the current UK government's policy platform is being fed into a woodchipper
A thread of reactions to the Government neutering Part 3 of the Planning an Infrastructure bill 👇 There are a lot of disappointed YIMBYs out there
This is so bad. How are they so weak? What was a mediocre bill is being watered down to be a completely pointless one.
NEW: Government accept changes to the planning bill put forward by MP Chris Hinchliff, after they suspended him on Wednesday Hinchliff had spearheaded a rebellion against the planning bill - with his amendment also supported by the three other suspended MPs 1/3
A door blows open in your mind when you learn about the suffix -le, it explains so much. People used to add it to verbs to mean ‘more than once’ or continuously—so originally, to ramble is to ‘roam’ on, to jostle is to joust repeatedly, and to sparkle is to emit lots of sparks.