Gautam Kamath

Seen on the back of a Chinese book for children. Which ones don't belong? Gemini translates them as "100 Kinds of {Modern Weapons, Classic Firearms} that Interest Children."

OpenAI has claimed a refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothetis (ETH). Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi and Ryan Williams (@rrwilliams.bsky.social) have been asked to organize a community-led effort to evaluate this claim. More here: docs.google.com/document/d/1... h/t @gautamkamath.com

Two people cold-emailed me today about an open problem I proposed at a conference in 2024. Both attached what is without any doubt the verbatim output of an AI model, asking for my feedback on it. tl;dr: this is not OK. I will answer your email, but I will not spend time if you yourself haven't.

As in previous years, TMLR will pause new submissions over the upcoming holiday period from November 30, 2026 at 11:59 PM to January 3, 2027 at 11:59 PM (AoE timezone for both). We will resume accepting new submissions on January 4, 2027. Happy Holidays!

this is absolutely nuts.

This is how you properly acknowledge that you used AI to write your paper.

How do you tell if authors fabricated their research results? Sometimes: they just tell you. Read, e.g., this caption carefully. Another banger of a post by my friend Nihar B. Shah on his blog, where he found at least 20+ such #ICLR2027 submissions: researchonresearch.blog/2026/10/20/s...

Do you have high quality work on the foundations of responsible computing, writ large? This covers everything from work on differential privacy to algorithmic fairness to designing mechanisms and markets to AI alignment. (Submit to FORC!) 1/ responsiblecomputing.org/forc-2027-ca...

The #FORC2027 Call for Papers is up! Submit your best work on the foundations of responsible computing, including, e.g., privacy, robustness, fairness, and (for the first time!) safety and alignment! First deadline: November 11 Conf: June 2-4 at Stanford responsiblecomputing.org/forc-2027-ca...

Check out the 1st Workshop on Incentives and Contribution Evaluation (WICE 2027), one of the #SaTML2027 workshops! Trying to understand the following question in collaborative learning: is it worth it to participate? Submission deadline: December 18 wice-satml.github.io

New blog post: A.I.: Anti-Intellectualism togelius.blogspot.com/2026/10/ai-a...

In any good zombie movie, the biggest problem is not necessarily the zombie themselves. It's how humans reveal their worst tendencies in a world with zombies. (This is a post about AI.)

What is TMLR doing under a 300% increase in submissions? - Suspensions of >150 authors - Publicly naming major violations - Submission quotas distinguishing slop patterns - Desk rejections 6% → 53%; focus on clarity - AI reviews evaluating soundness blog.tmlr.org/2026/adaptin...

In a bid to tackle a rapid surge in submissions, #AI conferences and journals are introducing caps on the number of papers that a researcher is allowed to submit. My latest for @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41... @gautamkamath.com

Over 400 academics in 30+ countries signed our open letter calling for immediate changes in AI development and deployment practices to ensure that cybersecurity incidents do not continue to occur, as future incidents will be far more damaging to our critical infrastructure.

Over 400 researchers and I have signed this open letter calling for the AI and security communities to come together to improve alignment and containment approaches in order to protect our critical infrastructure and digital systems. ai-security-letter.org

If you are at #COLM2026, be sure to check out our workshop on responsibly enabling data for foundation models -- starting at 8:45 AM in Union Square 17&18 / Fourth Floor. Featuring posters and contributed talks, as well as amazing plenary speakers 😲😲😲

i get why they do this (they want your data) but I absolutely hate it

#SaTML2027 has an incredible lineup of competitions and workshops. Check them out!

Announcing: the #SaTML2027 competitions and workshops! We have an amazing lineup of two competitions and four workshops. The workshops will be on May 3, ahead of the conference that runs May 3-6 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Read on to learn more about the competitions and workshops!

Happy mid-autumn festival! 中秋节快乐! 🥮

A pattern that I've been surprised by is people writing followup emails for their slop emails. Like, people are getting really insistent that I respond in earnest to emails they did not write.

AI tools are very useful for mathematical research. But at present, producing good work requires a labor intensive step that I have been calling "deslopping" - making the thing readable. Please do not skip this step; even if the theorem is great an unreadable paper is worthless.

Anyone got a hot tip when #NeurIPS2026 decisions gonna drop 👀👀👀

NYU Courant professor Tristan Buckmaster, of Navier-Stokes drama fame, gave a talk at the new NYU Mathematics in the Age of AI seminar series. It was... popular.

Over 100 years ago, steam engines were not welcomed by firefighters, who felt it would change what it meant to be a firefighter and it would result in job loss.

the internet rn

I'm a Program Chair for ICML 2027. We'd love any creative suggestions for a great conference! How to manage the explosion of AI slop and insane submission growth? How to manage reviewing? How to incentivize high quality creative work? How to reduce bureaucracy and overhead?

TMLR now has a shiny new blog! By popular demand, the days of Medium are over. All the old posts are already ported, please check it out (and its beautiful colour scheme). Thanks to Managing Editor @paulvicol.bsky.social for setting it up! blog.tmlr.org

Excited to join the new NYU Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science (@nyucourant.bsky.social) as an assistant professor of CS ~2 weeks ago! WOW its already been v exciting for ML and math at Courant in particular! While fun I hope not ever week is like this!!!

Do authors understand their own papers? Our desk rejection rate at TMLR is about 53% while it was only 6% in 2023 To understand the situation and assess our process, Nihar asked authors about their own TMLR submissions Learn the findings of the pilot study & share your thought

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

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...

Two things are simultaneously true about math: 1. understanding is important 2. it's useful I could see a future where there are 2 parallel pillars of math (both important): one of human understanding, and one of incomprehensible Lean-slop used directly to do useful things