George Cantwell

We’re hiring in Cambridge CS! Assistant/Associate Professor position in AI and machine learning, including learning theory and related areas of theoretical computer science. Apply here: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

An internal model at OpenAI has produced a claimed refutation of ETH! Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi, and I have been asked to help organize an open and independent examination of this claim. 1/4

Physics postdocs at Johns Hopkins! I would love to advocate for someone doing physics and complexity (though the committee has the final say). academicjobsonline.org/ajo/JHU/Phys...

OpenAI’s faster Fourier transform is less a mathematical breakthrough and more a malicious exploit of mathematical traditions.

Physicists have long known percolation on cubic lattice = 2nd order transition (already in review articles by the 70s). Some mathematicians didn't buy it. It does seem odd that now chatgpt might be what finally convinces them we were right all along. github.com/openai/math/...

Excited for NetSci-X 2027 in Hong Kong! Send your abstracts by Oct 1st (possible deadline extension coming soon), and see netscix2027.github.io for more details.

What if paperclips were just a metaphor for data centers all along. They have become the paperclip maximizers they claim to be so worried about.

Thinking back to the good old days when publishing a paper every three days required some human to be insecure enough to write up two ideas that didn't deserve to see the light of day every single week.

This quote by haunts me. From Wilcox's "Introduction to Robust Estimation and Hypothesis Testing" #stats

Tested an AI detector, it labelled my writing "idiosyncratic and blunt". Not long ago I might have been insulted... now I'm so proud to not be "modal and circuitous".

I get depressed when I review something and it seems AI-assisted (as in well written but shallow and making weird jumps in spots). Why am I wasting my time putting in thought that wasn’t given in the first place

Why is political science so adamant that the "issue space" is fixed??? It doesn't have to be, and it's not. This is a central assumption of the spatial voting theory frameworks, and people still cling onto it today. See Martin & Quinn and Poole & Rosenthal. 🧪🦋

My Yale colleague Dan Spielman has started a substack, which I thought I'd signal boost since Dan is an outstanding thinker and communicator (and person!) but isn't on social media much. Here's his first substantive post from a month ago: mathadjacent.com/p/llms-testi...

A paper is finished when the embarrassment of submitting it becomes smaller than the embarrassment of still working on it

Young academics interested in democracy: check out the postdoc program at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins! @snfagora.bsky.social snfagora.jhu.edu/fellowships-...

TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...

What do we think the groupchat for all the Fields Medal winners was called? @jugander.bsky.social

Also shows there is new physics to discover: a learned equation was more accurate than one derived by standard argument, so a better approximation *exists*. Now we just need to find it from first principles!

(deadline extended to September 13)

SFI is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work with SFI Professor David Wolpert on the thermodynamic cost of distributed computation, from digital circuits to human brains. We are seeking a scholar with expertise in physics, computer science, or a related field. santafe.edu/about/jobs/p...

I must have implemented simulated annealing 100 times. Here’s a vibe coded version w. MaxCut interface (the vibe was “mildly annoyed by comparisons to straw-man baselines”). github.com/gcant/anneal...

Interested in complex systems research in beautiful Vermont? Teams @vcsi.bsky.social hope to fill postdoctoral positions on very short notice. One position is at the intersection of cognitive and epidemiological modeling. DM for details or keep an eye out for postings on here.

"Puzzles reveal the limits of AI. The missing Aha! moments" by Cris Moore. Gift link 🎁. A more humanistic view on the value of solving problems ourselves. iai.tv/articles/puz... #MathSky 🧪

Sharing this postdoc opportunity at Imperial to develop and apply machine-learning and structural-bioinformatics methods for protein design, with focus on modern generative approaches such as protein diffusion models and flow-based models.

My new book! Written w my pal Alex Townsend, it's about the math behind enormous systems (medical scans, AI, etc.) and what happens when they outgrow our ability to understand them. Pre-order at @barnesandnoble.com for 25% off -> www.barnesandnoble.com/w/big-math-s... @littlebrown.bsky.social

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

Now with a nice "Editors' Suggestion" badge! We have some further rigorous results (i.e., not approximations) to follow shortly.

A report for university chancellors and presidents concerned about the state of academic scholarship: Statistical thinking is postmodern.

Interested in network science, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior? I am seeking a PhD student to join the Quantitative Network Science group at the Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning of the University of Zurich. Info and application here: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

We wrote a perspective piece on future directions & challenges for stochastic thermodynamics. Great collaboration with Jan Korbel, Sarah Loos, Gonzalo Manzano, Rosalba Garcia-Millan, Olga Movilla Miangolarra, Edgar Roldan arxiv.org/abs/2604.26601

Claude does not seem able to reliably answer: "how many cathedrals does the Church of England have?" What a weird blind spot.

Next week, my course on Networks and Complexity is starting again, which is always taught online. We have some space left for international students. Lectures will be on mondays and thursdays 16:00-18:00 CEST. Starting 9th. 24 Lectures total. More info in the reply.

Journal publishing is bad now, but …this year is the 40th anniversary of my first published paper and the 43rd anniversary of it being accepted for publication.

Can't get over the fact that in the ML literature the act of *sampling* from an inferred model is now called “inference.” We really are in the worst timeline.

We are looking for a PhD student to work with us on network science methods for biomedicine. The student can be enrolled in any graduate program. #NetworkMedicine #ComplexSystems.

I wrote a blog post about the often stated but never explained assumption that communities in graphs should always be connected. This is inconsistent with statistical significance and null models that underlie the most widely employed methods. skewed.de/lab/posts/co...

A principled graph embedding that also appears to work well in practice: arxiv.org/abs/2512.02694

Our review on multilayer network science is out on the arXiv. Thanks to all collaborators of the AccelNet MultiNet project, great working with you all 🙏 @alexvespi.bsky.social @ymoreno.bsky.social @lordgrilo.bsky.social @anduviera.bsky.social @baronca.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.23371

Very good post. I very much agree with the overall position.

Excited to introduce Vibes from Meta. Eat your slop, piggies!

Message passing for epidemiological interventions on networks with loops https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21596

Our fall seminar series begins this Thursday, Oct. 2 (4pm UTC+1/11am EDT) with a talk by Elena Candellone. She’ll be speaking about “Mapping extreme users through negative ties in online social interactions”, followed by a discussion on “the joy of planning scientific events”.

arXiv alert! 📄🚨 Robustness of small networks arxiv.org/abs/2509.23670 Great to dust off one of my favorite topics and get to collaborate with the legendary @aliceschwarze.bsky.social and Peter Mucha

#SpreadtheWord We are looking for #PhD candidates passionate about using large-scale data analysis, quantitative models, and complexity science to study the complex interactions within #epidemiology, #OneHealth, and #publichealthsystems. More info: csh.ac.at/education/gr...

The Probabilistic Systems, Information, and Inference group at the University of Cambridge is seeking applicants for funded PhD positions. Anyone who wants to study networks/complex systems/statistical physics/inference can email me at gtc31@cam.ac.uk

We found a nice way to accurately solve the SIS model. Rather than expanding in space with ever larger moment closures (pairs, triples, ...), we expand in time. No more difficult than pair-approximations yet much more accurate. arxiv.org/abs/2509.11706

Strong emergence

Postdoc job! I expect to have an opening at Johns Hopkins for a postdoctoral researcher working somewhere in the broad realms of physics, philosophy, and complexity. Apply at Academic Jobs Online: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30496