Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

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In September, we hosted a working group to think about how the TCS community should respond to AI progress. Their report, released yesterday, highlights 12 near-term actions that received broad support among the participants.

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1/4 Are diffusion language models ready for the real world? Not quite. Today's diffusion language models are missing some key ingredients, said @volokuleshov of @Cornell, at the Simons Institute workshop on Diffusion Generative Modeling: Progress and Next Steps

Join us Tuesday, 9/29 for the first Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture of this academic year, featuring @BooleanAnalysis.

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We invite your project proposals for Circles, the Simons Institute – Jane Street Small Group Collaborations, which supports groups of 3–6 researchers for 4 weeklong gatherings over 2 years.

Apply by Oct. 15 (deadline extended).

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1/5 The case for diffusion language models: "A lot of the [early] gains in language modeling performance have come from scaling pre-training...[the training algorithm] was designed to be very parallelizable across GPUs," said @volokuleshov of @Cornell at the Simons Institute

1/5 Imagine taking an fMRI scan of the brain of a person viewing an image, and reconstructing what the person saw from the fMRI alone. That's Brain-IT. "This is state-of-the-art image decoding from fMRI," said Michal Irani (@WeizmannScience), at the Simons Institute.

1/3 From task-specific neural data to foundation models. In neuroscience, studying the neural activity of some behavior in an animal only gives us "a snapshot of the full activity that might be present across the brain," said Eva Dyer of @Penn at the Simons Institute.

The Dark Matter of Neuroscience. For decades, "neuroscience didn't have much to say about two people...in a dynamical interaction," said Guillaume Dumas (@introspection) of @Mila_Quebec at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning

The African philosophy Ubuntu — "I am because you are" — inspires Guillaume Dumas (@introspection) of @Mila_Quebec, in his research on social cognition and interaction. Dumas spoke at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning

1/3 For AIs to be socially intelligent, they'll have to learn internal "social world models" of people & social interactions, not just physical world models, said Paul Liang (@MITEECS) at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning

The schedule of talks for our Aug. 24–28 ICM Satellite Conference on Spectral Theory, High-Dimensional Expansion, and Pseudorandomness is now online:

simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/icm-…

1/4 "AI is not when computer can write poetry. AI is when computer will *want* to write poetry." @UCBerkeley's Alyosha Efros quoted a friend, when talking about the nature of "True AI," at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning

1/3 AI and Its Discontents: @UCBerkeley's @JitendraMalikCV talked of the "rumblings of dissent,", when it comes to the current approach of scaling up frontier multimodal models, at the Simons Institute workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning

This week at the Simons Institute, a workshop on Diffusion Generative Modeling: Progress and Next Steps

simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/diff…

Simons Institute Director Venkat Guruswami has been honored this summer with STOC and CCC 2026 Test of Time Awards for papers that transformed coding theory and pseudorandomness, and emerged from a common algebraic core.

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In robotics, "there are problems to be solved which are to do with shortage of data and only when we solve them will we solve robotics," said @UCBerkeley's @JitendraMalikCV at the Simons Institute's workshop on Topics in Intelligence: World Models and Social Reasoning.

Congratulations to all the #ICM2026 Fields Medal and Abacus Medal recipients! And special kudos to theoretical computer scientist Shayan Oveis Gharan, who received the Abacus Medal, and has been a program organizer and frequent long-term visitor at the Institute over the years.

@knikct is now the Simons Institute’s Interim Associate Director! He succeeds Sampath Kannan, who returns to UPenn this fall. Taking Nikhil’s place as Senior Scientist is Berkeley Statistics and EECS faculty member @jasondeanlee.

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