FR/US/GB AI/ML Person, Director of Research at @GoogleDeepMind, Honorary Professor at @UCL_DARK, @ELLISforEurope Fellow. All posts are personal.
Dec 31, 2025 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
🧵 Time for a short end-of-2025 wrap up 🧵
Genuinely aiming for this to be a short one for two reasons: 1. I'm doing it at the last moment 😅 2. Most of what I was involved in is not stuff that can be shared publicly (yet… or ever?). Or maybe I was just lazy...
Let's go [1/12]
On the UCL front, @akbirkhan and @_robertkirk, who had started at Anthropic and AISI, formally finished their PhDs early in the year, leaving me with two PhD students. @LauraRuis completed hers more recently and is now doing a postdoc at MIT. Down to one… [2/12]
Mar 1, 2025 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Without being crass, I've made a decent chunk of change several times over the last decade. Every time, I've noted two things. Here's a short unironic 🧵 about why you should take any advice from people like me (or those who've made more) with a very large grain of salt. [1/6]
1. A large factor is being at the right place at the right time. Skill & taste create opportunity, but luck often realizes results. The well-known bullet-ridden plane picture is overused & oversimplifies things, but is essentially true. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. [2/6]
Nov 19, 2024 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
🌶️(?) take: Agents are somehow hot right because people realized that LLM output can be interpreted as a DSL which directs side effects in the world (e.g. tool calls) rather than just returning text in a chat/autocomplete sense. What are the open challenges? A 🧵... [1/11]
Setting aside the fact that people are literally re-inventing a bunch of terminology around agents when we have several decades of framing from RL (POMDPs, anyone?) that we can rely on to describe what we're doing, the main challenges are as follows, working backwards. [2/11]
Dec 29, 2020 • 16 tweets • 9 min read
2020 retrospective time. It's been a rubbish year for productivity, but I've been privileged to have that being the main impact of the pandemic in my life. I feel sorrow and sympathy that not everyone can say the same…
Here's some highlights and related thanks.
[1/14]
It seems like the work was done years and years ago, but happy to have been able to revisit our work on RTFM with @hllo_wrld when he presented it at @iclr_conf 2020. arxiv.org/abs/1910.08210 [2/14]
Dec 31, 2019 • 19 tweets • 16 min read
To end 2019, I want to express thanks for all the great people I've worked with this year. Naturally, this is an opportunity to brag a little, but all this work is due thanks to leadership/effort from fantastic interns, collaborators, etc, so hopefully you will indulge me (1/16)
It's been a delightfully short working year, thanks to @Facebook's generous paternity leave (4mo) thanks to which I spent (along with PTO) over 40% of the year at home with my infant daughter. Both practically, and in terms of morale, this has been a huge help. (2/16)
