David Mimno

Optimist: AI has achieved human level performance! Realist: “AI” is a collection of brittle hacks that, under very specific circumstances, mimic the surface level of human intelligence Pessimist: AI HAS achieved human level performance

NEW PREPRINT: Cheap AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering and What It Will Do (in submission) We argue that AI coding tools make it easy, cheap, and fast to reverse engineer software and hardware—and IP law is not prepared for this challenge. arxiv.org/abs/2610.35633

If you want to say “data are” you have to say how many data you have #teammassnoun

Cool postdoc at Princeton on *AI as a cultural technology*, within their Societal AI initiative, perfect for candidates in digital humanities/cultural analytics working on downstream impacts of AI on culture. Get to work with @mmvty.bsky.social and other great people! apply.interfolio.com/195460

A modest proposal: if you cite the "LLM as judge" paper, you should only get AI reviews

Side benefit of this idea: I can direct prospectives to less established faculty they might not be aware of

We have a job opening (Assistant or Associate Prof) in Psychology at Cornell! Focus is on relationship science, broadly defined Deadline is soon: Nov 1st Please pass along to possible applicants! psychology.cornell.edu/open-positio...

At UMass Amherst, we will be hiring tenure-track faculty in natural language processing! Applications due December 1. See the job posting here: careers.umass.edu/jobs/assista...

We are hiring!! "Artificial intelligence, broadly construed. This includes embodied AI and robotics, machine learning and the systems that support it, and AI developed for problems in science, engineering, medicine, education, and society." jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

Fun thing! I'm looking at a copy of a book of summaries of Aristotle’s natural philosophy (Naturalis totius philosophiae paraphrases (1538)), and the book has a semi-circle mirror set into the backboard. Has any one seen this elsewhere? What's going on? A device to connect up with the Aristotle?

Today is the day! DATA BY DESIGN is out in the world! With immense gratitude to the entire project team, to @gita2.bsky.social, and to @mitpress.bsky.social, for turning this vision into reality. We're so excited to be able to celebrate with all of you!

Book launch today! My new book, "Why You Should Read More Fiction" (Johns Hopkins), is part of a wave of digital humanities work that explains why reading fiction is so important for our minds, especially right now. I hope you'll pick up a copy and spread the word. #digitalhumanities #fiction

Cornell Information Science is hiring! Specifically looking for folks studying "the role of computing and AI in education and learning, including in global environments beyond the United States." academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/33075

Wikipedia helped make LLMs possible. Now, it is grappling with how to use them. Unlike its peers, Korean Wikipedia embraced LLMs through WikiVault: only 0.1% of editors use it, but it accounts for ~30% of new bytes! New preprint led by @inhwa.bsky.social (who's at @acm-cscw.bsky.social!!) 🧵

We've been super busy the past few months getting out some research on the computational analysis of film, so I've put together a page with the highlights. people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dbamman/fil... Some things to call out: 1/7

🚨 [Token][ization] Paper Alert 🚨 Tokenization is a wildly understudied area of language modeling despite it having effects across all of NLP. Over the past ~8 months, 32 (!) tokenizer researchers put together the most comprehensive survey of the field. Check it out!

In 2023, Change.org integrated an AI-assisted writing tool into their platform. We found that access to the tool changed platform trends in petition text, but that outcomes (signatures and comments) did not improve... Excited that this paper is out, check it out! 🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you're at #COLM2026, come check out our poster for "Spoiler Alert" (arxiv.org/abs/2604.09854). We ask why LLM fiction is so bad at holding narrative tension, and create a metric to measure tension in short stories. What improves LLM fiction on this metric, it turns out, is narrative planning.

An updated version of Scott Enderle's Topic Modeling Tool is now available here: github.com/mimno/topic-... Beta testers welcome!

Has anyone made Yes / Yes to all / No USB foot pedals?

Sparsity is back! Sparsity is everywhere in language, but managing it requires overhead. For the last ~15 years it was faster to just do the dense operation, knowing most of it was useless. That sparse operations work is a huge shift in the "do something clever" vs. "spend more money" tradeoff.

"Will no agents rid me of this turbulent priest?"

If you haven't yet registered for TADA 2026 on October 5th (day before COLM), registration is open to the public! Detailed schedule forthcoming, but lots of fantastic posters and talks. We even have a second half-day of lightning talks scheduled! tada2026.eventbrite.com

Models like Talkie-1930 sound like voices from the past. If they could reliably speak from specified historical vantage points, researchers might also use them to simulate the past. But how reliable are they? Today we release a benchmark answering that question for English contexts 1831-1930.

This seems to be the most popular alternative to jev. Laya: Multilingual, non-autoregressive System 1 decision model. huggingface.co/convaiinnova... Laya Repo: github.com/NandhaKishor... Laya MLX: huggingface.co/aac6fef/laya... Laya MLX Repo: github.com/mizorewww/la...

We have a new paper on AI debunking that includes a bunch of interesting data on various "epistemically suspect beliefs". Check it out!

We are hiring for several positions in the UW Information School, including a tenure-track position in Library and Information Science. Please share with anyone interested in these areas! Deadline October 30. Job: apply.interfolio.com/192127

Prospective PhD students: if you work on computational humanities, cultural analytics and/or cultural AI, pls apply to Duke English! We're recruiting in these areas & you'd join a vibrant community. Candidates with training in both lit studies + CS/sciences esp welcome. Email me if any questions!

The #DataSittersClub is back... but the news is Terminal 💀. You'll survive, though, with @alyssavi.bsky.social new DSC little tl;dr #4: Navigating the Terminal for the First Time. It's the honest, practical, funny guide to the Mac Terminal that you need before you get down to work with other tools.

Part 2 of the #DataSittersClub back-to-school spree is @alyssavi.bsky.social DSC little tl;dr #5: What's the Deal with Topic Modeling? Topic modeling is one of the first methods people hear about with digital humanities, but really... what's up with it? And how are you supposed to do it? And when?

A university founded in the Middle Ages in a city that centers itself around a Medieval castle does not see a need to study Medieval History

whoa, the claude code update is suddenly much more aggressive about going off and doing things without asking

I’d check kalshi

We're hiring in Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder! ☀️⛰️ Machine learning and NLP people, please apply!

PhD students (& new PhDs): I'm hiring a postdoc at Cornell (Ithaca) to conduct a novel study at the intersection of political economy and tech. Applications are due Oct 16. There are a LOT more details in the job ad so make sure to read it thoroughly: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32502

The silence from industry in the face of concerted attacks on US competitiveness has been disgraceful. Will this finally wake them up? Or will they just offshore all skilled work? And yes, this is a constitutional crisis if the executive can apply a “ridiculous fee” veto to any legislation.

The silence from industry in the face of concerted attacks on US competitiveness has been disgraceful. Will this finally wake them up? Or will they just offshore all skilled work? And yes, this is a constitutional crisis if the executive can apply a “ridiculous fee” veto to any legislation.