David Pfau (@pfau) / X

David Pfau

22.8K posts

David Pfau

@pfau

Knowledge manifests itself in radiant dreams that shimmer like the wild sun Views are my own davidpfau.com on 🦋

London

Joined April 2008

Pinned
David Pfau
@pfau
Aug 22, 2024
I’m beyond thrilled to share that our work on using deep learning to compute excited states of molecules is out today in @ScienceMagazine! This is the first time that deep learning has accurately solved some of the hardest problems in quantum physics.
science.org
Accurate computation of quantum excited states with neural networks
We present an algorithm to estimate the excited states of a quantum system by variational Monte Carlo, which has no free parameters and requires no orthogonalization of the states, instead transfor...
249K
David Pfau
@pfau
Nov 4, 2025
They came from Joe fucking Biden.
JD Ross
@justindross
Nov 4, 2025
Where did these factories come from all of a sudden? 5GW of solar/yr from a single factory in Dallas?? Is America not that screwed here?
974K
David Pfau
@pfau
Aug 4, 2025
Just caught up with a friend doing a PhD in a top CS program. He got double-fucked by DOGE. His grant is in limbo because everyone who knows how to access the money got fired, and all the data that made the basis for his thesis got deleted.
119K
David Pfau
@pfau
May 1, 2024
Alternate history where Wiener went with the Latin rather than Greek root and called it "gubernatics" instead of "cybernetics", leading William Gibson to call it "guberspace" and "guberpunk".
282K
David Pfau
@pfau
Aug 23, 2025
No joke, this is because blue LEDs first appeared in 1994.
201K
David Pfau
@pfau
Dec 24, 2022
A compiler. You just described a compiler.
Naveen Rao
@NaveenGRao
Dec 23, 2022
Can someone make an LLM that takes in Python and spits out optimized [X86, ARM, RISCV, *] assembler code? That would be so cool. it could even go from [Python, C++, Java, *] to native assembler. Instruct fine-tune it to make PIC or arch-specific optimizations
935K
David Pfau
@pfau
May 17, 2025
Oh it's like *dead* dead. Interesting also that almost every reply says the issue was overzealous mods rather than AI.
Marc Gravell
@marcgravell
May 15, 2025
StackOverflow questions over time, source SEDE; sadface, lunch has been eaten
416K
David Pfau
@pfau
Oct 11, 2025
Probably my favorite factoid about Hinton's family is that basically all of them were mathematicians, going all the way back to George Boole, except for one guy who invented the jungle gym.
Acquired Podcast
@AcquiredFM
Oct 10, 2025
Geoffrey Hinton, father of deep learning (right) at age 31, with Chris Riesbeck (left). La Jolla, CA.
328K
David Pfau
@pfau
Jan 22, 2023
I feel like I just live in a different universe from these people? I haven't once gotten a result out from using it that makes me think "oh, this is a useful tool I need to have access to". Am I taking crazy pills here?
Nabeel S. Qureshi
@nabeelqu
Jan 21, 2023
Pretty much every smart person I know has a ChatGPT tab open while they work now. Amazing how fast that happened.
1.1M
David Pfau
@pfau
Aug 12, 2024
My basic political philosophy is that monopolies are bad but the decline of Bell Labs set back human civilization by several decades. I'm still not sure how to reconcile this.
442K
David Pfau
@pfau
Dec 4, 2022
We literally solved protein folding.
Ben Recht
@beenwrekt
Dec 4, 2022
It's deeply depressing that the killer app of contemporary machine learning is bullshit generation.
David Pfau
@pfau
Mar 11, 2025
I'm Jewish. I got my PhD in neuroscience from Columbia in 2014. The biomedical research isn't even on the same campus as the protests. The Joint Task Force to Combat "anti-Semitism" will go down in infamy alongside HUAC. It makes me sick.
NIH
@NIH
Mar 10, 2025
Today #NIH is terminating more than $250 million in funding—including more than 400 grants—to Columbia University following directives from the Trump Administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. The cancellations are due to Columbia University’s continued inaction
200K
David Pfau
@pfau
Nov 9, 2023
I am absolutely begging everyone who works in tech to read Foucault.
Jules
@julesterpak
Nov 9, 2023
The @Humane AI pin is here Orders begin November 16th. Pricing starts at $699 and requires a $24/month subscription. It runs on a Humane-branded version of T-Mobile’s network with access to AI models from Microsoft and OpenAI Watch and learn more here: hu.ma.ne
00:00
1.3M
David Pfau
@pfau
Aug 1, 2025
In a couple of years, no one will say they seriously thought you could get to AGI just by scaling up 2023 LLMs, but that was basically the consensus view for a certain crowd for about a year and a half.
Amir Efrati
@amir
Aug 1, 2025
GPT-5 is good. But model performance gains are still slower than in past years and this year has been a technically challenging one for OpenAI researchers. The inside story here...
304K