New conceptual paper (w/Dana Calacci and Cindy Lin) at #ACM #AAAI #AIES2025 on why there’s no accountability for social claims in so-called “general-purpose” Machine Learning research. I will present the paper on the 21st on a gargantuan poster;)

Paper: lnkd.in/ePn8USDx
My website: koutianqi.info

Technical debt, generalizability debt, no one talking about boycott debt.

My home institution, Penn State, is on the precipice of having a grad student union! I am so proud of all the work we’ve done.

This week, Cristian Larroulet Philipi joins us to talk about measurement in the human sciences: why it can be more philosophically complex than in the physical sciences, and how it raises pressing questions about the role of numbers in psychology, social science, and policy

#philsci #measurement

After one too many conversations about the ways GenAI + peer review = shitshow for all involved, I dashed off this slightly polemic commentary on how I think we should talk about GenAI as an epistemic carcinogen.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

1/ 🚨 Our paper (w/ @dana.witchy.business & Cindy Lin) is accepted to AAAI/ACM #AIES2025! 📷 arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08739
⚠️ ML papers make broad/implicit social claims - but these often don’t match reality. We call this mismatch the claim-reality gap.

📣🚨NEW: ☁️ Big Cloud—Google, Microsoft & Amazon—control two thirds of the cloud compute market. They’re getting rich off the AI gold rush.

In new work with @nathanckim.bsky.social, we show how Big Cloud is expanding their empire by scrutinizing their *investments*… 🧵

📄PDF: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Already in town in LA for PLSC 2025!!!! Friends hit me up for coffee dinner or city walk;)!!!

Excited to announce my first peer-reviewed paper 'The Problem of Context Revisited' is out now!

Open access in the excellent 'Studies in History and Philosophy of Science', EIC @rachelankeny.bsky.social

Love any feedback, cheers

#philsci #histsci #sts #hps

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Reasonable to ask if we are now oppressing the Russian opposition at Putin’s behest.
theins.press/en/news/280037

Some news many years in the making: My book EMPIRE OF AI, out May 20, is ready for pre-order at empireofai.com. It tells the inside story of OpenAI as a lens for understanding the moment we’re in: the tech elite's extraordinary seizure of power and its threat to democracy. 1/

January update from the normative philosophy of computing newsletter: new CFPs, papers, workshops, and resources for philosophers working on normative questions raised by AI and computing.

In his last blog Felix Hill talked about he cannot get away from AI wherever he is, yet so many online eulogies still mourn how good at it he was. This field really is so f’ed up. I’ll be angry writing my facct submission tmr.

Mary Shelley's novel suggests not only that magic and alchemy preceded science but also that science can infuse and revive their prescientific ambitions.

Linked blog is on the current AI bubble - AI PhDs’s skills are in much lower demand than 10 years ago. The blogger very poignantly implied that innovation stagnation led to this. “Science” is replaced with rote training that BS/MS can take on with less compensation and more workable ego.