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Jeff Clune

@jeffclune.com
3.8K followers 69 following 124 posts

Professor, Computer Science, University of British Columbia. CIFAR AI Chair, Vector Institute. Senior Advisor, DeepMind. ML, AI, deep RL, deep learning, AI-Generating Algorithms (AI-GAs), open-endedness.

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Reposted by Jeff Clune
UBC Computer Science @cs.ubc.ca · 23/10/2025
UBC Computer Science invites applications for up to two full-time tenure-track positions with the following priority areas: visualization, robotics, reinforcement learning, data management, and data mining. Applications are due Wed Dec 10, 2025. Learn more: www.cs.ubc.ca/our-departme...
UBC Computer Science is hiring up to 2 full-time tenure-track Assistant Professor positions. Applications due Dec 10 2025
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Reposted by Jeff Clune
Yoshua Bengio @yoshuabengio.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
AI is evolving too quickly for an annual report to suffice. To help policymakers keep pace, we're introducing the first Key Update to the International AI Safety Report. 🧵⬇️ (1/10)
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Reposted by Jeff Clune
Aaron Dharna @aadharna.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
For all the details, please give the paper a read! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.06466 Infinite thanks to @jeffclune.com and @cong-ml.bsky.social for all their guidance!
arxiv.org
Foundation Model Self-Play: Open-Ended Strategy Innovation via Foundation Models
Multi-agent interactions have long fueled innovation, from natural predator-prey dynamics to the space race. Self-play (SP) algorithms try to harness these dynamics by pitting agents against ever-impr...
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Reposted by Jeff Clune
UBC Computer Science @cs.ubc.ca · 07/08/2025
Read this article on how AI is contributing to its own development, featuring UBC Computer Science Professor @jeffclune.com!
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Reposted by Jeff Clune
Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society @torontosri.bsky.social · 15/09/2025
💡The fall SRI Seminar Series kicks off on Wednesday with @jeffclune.com (UBC / Vector / DeepMind): “Open-ended and AI-generating algorithms in the era of foundation models” Wed 12:30 ET Free, online🔗https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/events-archive/seminar-2025-jeff-clune-2
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 10/07/2025
Thrilled to introduce Foundation Model Self-Play, led by Aaron Dharna. FMSPs combine the intelligence & code generation of foundation models with the curriculum of self-play & principles of open-endedness to explore diverse strategies in multi-agent games. Thread x.com/jeffclune/st...
x.com
Jeff Clune on X: "Thrilled to introduce Foundation Model Self-Play, led by @_aadharna. FMSPs combine the intelligence & code generation of foundation models with the curriculum of self-play & principles of open-endedness to explore diverse strategies in multi-agent games, like the one below 🧵👇 https://t.co/GqTWM5P3CC" / X
Thrilled to introduce Foundation Model Self-Play, led by @_aadharna. FMSPs combine the intelligence & code generation of foundation models with the curriculum of self-play & principles of open-endedness to explore diverse strategies in multi-agent games, like the one below 🧵👇 https://t.co/GqTWM5P3CC
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 27/06/2025
Nice summary, with coverage of the Darwin Gödel Machine. www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1ku...
youtube.com
AI’s “Intelligence Explosion” Is Coming. Here’s What That Means.
YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 27/06/2025
A great summary of the latest in open-endedness research! The next big wave in AI? 🤔📈🚀 richardcsuwandi.github.io/blog/2025/op...
richardcsuwandi.github.io
The future of AI is open-ended | Richard Cornelius Suwandi
Embracing open-endedness in the pursuit of creative AI
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 23/06/2025
How it felt to know AGI is coming soon long before the world was paying attention. officechai.com/ai/building-...
officechai.com
Building AI Felt Like Watching An Alien Intelligence Arrive: Early OpenAI Researcher
OpenAI had stunned the world by releasing ChatGPT in November 2022, but it turns out that the researchers working on the technology were even more stunned at what they'd developed. Jeff Clune, a fo...
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 20/06/2025
Very nice summary of the Darwin Gödel Machine in Fortune, and an interesting tie-in to Sam's excellent recent blog post. fortune.com/2025/06/19/o...
fortune.com
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says "we are past the event horizon." Is he right?
Researchers from Sakana AI and Google DeepMind have created AI that can improve its own code.
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 03/06/2025
I am excited to be a part of @Yoshua_Bengio's new non-profit focused on AI Safety and Existential Risk, joining the great team of Scientific Advisors. This is a critically important mission for humanity.
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Reposted by Jeff Clune
Stand Up for Science! @standupforscience.net · 31/05/2025
It's Friday Night, which means Trump's weekly science bloodbath. BUT WHY DOES HE DO THIS ON FRIDAY NIGHTS? Simple: He's a coward! Americans overwhelmingly support science! His attack on science is unpopular and he wants to bury it in the news cycle. Not on our watch. #StandUpForScience
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 30/05/2025
Excited to introduce the Darwin Gödel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents. We harness the power of open-ended algorithms to search for agentic systems that get better at coding, including improving their own code.
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 20/05/2025
Is there a cancer at the heart of modern AI, lurking just beneath the surface of its dazzling performance? Our research suggests maybe, but also shows elegant solutions are possible (though how to get them at scale remains a mystery). Check out the eye-opening, riveting paper below!
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 16/05/2025
Why do we tolerate loud motorcycles? I can't walk around with a crazy loud speaker, yet we allow people to have (and companies to sell) insanely loud machines that torture everyone else. They can be made quiet or silent...we should start heavily taxing and fining noise polluting machines.
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 14/05/2025
Very cool work! Fun to see an algorithm inspired by MAP-Elites help advance numerous open problems in math, computer science, AND improve Google's production infrastructure (data centers, TPU design, and AI training)! (Paraphrasing their paper and tweet).
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 29/04/2025
I greatly enjoyed “The Spectrum of AI Risks” panel at the Singapore Conference on AI. Thanks @teganmaharaj.bsky.social for great moderating, Max Tegmark for the invitation, and the organizers and other panelists for a great event! PS. Do I really have sad resting panel face? 😐
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 28/04/2025
I'm giving a talk at 11:30 today in the #ICLR World Models workshop. "Open-ended Agent Learning in the Era of Foundation Models and Foundation World Models." Drop by if you are interested! sites.google.com/view/worldmo...
sites.google.com
ICLR 2025 Workshop World Models - Schedule & Speaker
Schedule (Tentative)
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 27/04/2025
Tom @rockt.ai did a great job in his #ICLR2025 keynote on open-endedness of explaining the ideas we are all so passionate about. A huge thanks for the kind words and for featuring our work, including Jenny Zhang's OMNI. cc @kennethstanley.bsky.social @joelbot3000.bsky.social
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 25/04/2025
Very excited for this keynote by @_rockt! Awesome to see open-endedness go from a niche (😉) area to a keynote at #ICLR ! 🌱🌿🌳🌲🍀🌍✨ 📈 🧬🧪 cc @joelbot3000.bsky.social @kennethstanley.bsky.social
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 08/04/2025
Since the dawn of my career I've heard scientists joke after every AI advance “Now we just need to get AI to write the paper. Now The AI Scientist does all the research AND writes the paper! Wild times! 🧪🔬👩‍🔬🤖
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Reposted by Jeff Clune
Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Introducing The AI Scientist-v2, which produced the 1st fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review at a workshop level (at #ICLR2025) ‼️ Tech Report: pub.sakana.ai/ai-scientist... GitHub: github.com/SakanaAI/AI-... This work is a proud collaboration between Sakana AI, UBC, and Oxford University.
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Reposted by Jeff Clune
UBC Science @science.ubc.ca · 04/04/2025
Collecting a diamond in #Minecraft is “a very hard task”, says Dr. Jeff Clune (@jeffclune.com) of @cs.ubc.ca, who was part of a team that trained a program to find diamonds using videos of human play2. “This represents a major step forward for the field.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
AI masters Minecraft: DeepMind program finds diamonds without being taught
The Dreamer system reached the milestone by ‘imagining’ the future impact of possible decisions.
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 03/04/2025
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Reposted by Jeff Clune
Gary Marcus @garymarcus.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
Trump is the greatest gift to China in history.
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 02/04/2025
Awesome work. Great to see Dreamer in Nature! Congrats Danijar Hafner et al. Nature news article on it with quotes from yours truly. Below is the quote I provided that did not make it into the article. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
AI masters Minecraft: DeepMind program finds diamonds without being taught
The Dreamer system reached the milestone by ‘imagining’ the future impact of possible decisions.
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Reposted by Jeff Clune
Cory Booker @corybooker.com · 02/04/2025
I may be tired and a little hoarse, but as I said again and again on the Senate floor, this is a moment where we cannot afford to be silent, when we must speak up.
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Reposted by Jeff Clune
Erik Brynjolfsson @erikbryn.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
When whites and minorities drive at identical speeds (according to objectively measured data from Lyft) Florida police are 24-33% more likely to issue speeding citations to minority drivers and charge them 23-34% greater fines. These are not small effects!
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 13/03/2025
indianexpress.com/article/tech...
indianexpress.com
World’s 1st AI-generated paper by Japanese startup Sakana passes peer-review
The AI startup submitted three research papers generated by its AI system for review at the ICLR 2025 workshop.
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 13/03/2025
It is an honor to receive a Killam Accelerator Research Fellowship. Thank you to everyone involved!
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 13/03/2025
What a remarkable milestone in history! Since at least 2010 I heard the joke amongst AI scientists "Now if only we could get AI to write the paper." Fast forward 14 years and it's possible! Exciting times! 🧪 🧫 🔬 🚀 📈
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 10/03/2025
Your chance to work with one of the all time great minds in science! 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 10/03/2025
thelogic.co/news/ai-safe...
thelogic.co
Ottawa shakes up AI advisory group with star researchers and big companies - The Logic
The federal government has announced a star-studded council to advise on AI safety and revamped an existing team to add more names from big business.
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 07/03/2025
Honored to serve on the Government of Canada's Safe & Secure AI Advisory Group to keep it "well informed on risks associated with AI systems" w/ AI luminaries, e.g. @yoshuabengio.bsky.social Joelle Pineau, Elissa Strome, @davidduvenaud.bsky.social & many others ised-isde.canada.ca/site/advisor...
ised-isde.canada.ca
Safe and Secure AI Advisory Group
Safe and Secure AI Advisory Group
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 05/03/2025
My guest lecturing for the Stanford CS course Self-Improving AI Agents. The talk is online, titled "Open-ended Agent Learning in the Era of Foundation Models" (w/ more emphasis on the AI Scientist and ADAS than prior versions). Thanks profs @Azaliamirh & @achowdhery! www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZBu...
youtube.com
Guest Lecture 6 CS329A by Prof. Jeff Clune:Open-ended Agent Learning in the Era of Foundation Models
YouTube video by Aakanksha Chowdhery
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 14/02/2025
It was an honor to be on Quirks and Quarks (the CBC science show) with @cong-ml.bsky.social talking about The AI Scientist and the impact of AI on science. Science is being transformed by the AI revolution cbc.ca/listen/live-...
cbc.ca
© CBC/Radio-Canada 2025. All rights reserved.
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 12/02/2025
Introducing Automated Capability Discovery! ACD automatically identifies surprising new capabilities and failure modes in foundation models, via "self-exploration" (models exploring their own abilities). Led by @cong-ml.bsky.social & @shengranhu.bsky.social 🔬🤖🧠🔎 [1/9]
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Vector Institute @vectorinstitute.ai · 11/02/2025
🤔 What if AI could explain its thought process before taking action? Our latest ANDERS blog covers Vector Researchers @jeffclune.com & @shengranhu.bsky.social’s wrk on "thought cloning" - teaching AI to express its reasoning process in language we can understand vectorinstitute.ai/thought-clon...
vectorinstitute.ai
Thought Cloning: Teaching AI to Think Like Humans for Better Decision-Making - Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence
New research from Vector Faculty Member Jeff Clune and Vector Graduate Student Shengran Hu introduces a groundbreaking approach to imitation learning that could potentially revolutionize how we train ...
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 29/01/2025
Nice to see international collaborations of this scale on AI safety! Also nice that our work (four papers) contributed to the discussion (full disclosure: that's both on safety, but also on creating powerful general agents, including mentions of The AI Scientist and SIMA). tldr; it's complicated
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 24/01/2025
Operator is the descendant of VPT (work our team did at OpenAI on learning to use a mouse+keyboard to perform long-horizon tasks (demonstrated in Minecraft). As we wrote in that blog post, VPT is "a step towards general computer-using agents." Released ~2.5 years later. openai.com/index/introd...
openai.com
Introducing Operator
A research preview of an agent that can use its own browser to perform tasks for you. Available to Pro users in the U.S.
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 22/01/2025
Research Idea: Predict abstract properties of text in addition to next-word prediction as helpful auxiliary losses. Has this been tried? (1/n)
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 22/01/2025
Our UBC lab + collaborators had 3/3 papers accepted to #ICLR2025! 🚀🚀🚀🍻🍻🍻💥💥💥👊👊👊💡💡💡 Thanks @iclr-conf.bsky.social ACs, reviewers, and organizers. 🙏 See everyone in Singapore! 🇸🇬
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 13/01/2025
A copy of Tim's @rockt.ai has arrived. As I say on the back cover, I read it cover to cover and recommend it to those looking to ramp up on modern AI. Congrats and thanks Tim!
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 13/01/2025
Many comments from @geoffreyhinton & myself in this nice CBC article. Do you disagree with us? "The stakes are extremely high. If we get this right, we get tremendous upside. And if we get this wrong, we might be talking about the end of human civilization." www.cbc.ca/news/science...
cbc.ca
Will we control AI, or will it control us? Top researchers weigh in | CBC News
Some of Canada's top minds in AI offer their predictions for the development of artificial superintelligence, how the technology may change our lives — for better or for worse — in the years to come, ...
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 08/01/2025
It's an honor that The AI Scientist is #1 on this list! www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... Congrats @chris-lu.bsky.social @cong-ml.bsky.social @RobertTLange @hardmaru.bsky.social @jfoerst.bsky.social
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 07/01/2025
I strongly believe the development of superintelligence is inevitable. I do not believe humanity has the ability to not invent it, given its economic, scientific, and military value. Many people say things like “we should not build AGI” without realizing that outcome is virtually impossible. 1/
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 06/01/2025
I greatly enjoyed this interview on MLStreetTalk It covers a wide range of topics I am interested in (open-endedness, AI-GAs, AI safety, etc.), includes my scientific origin story, and has great visuals edited in. Thanks Tim Scarfe! www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw5W...
youtube.com
What is interesting to an AI agent?
YouTube video by Machine Learning Street Talk
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 20/12/2024
I am one of the PIs you could apply to work with via this excellent program. Please consider applying!
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 17/12/2024
I guess AI and human scientists stand on the shoulders of the same giants.
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Jeff Clune @jeffclune.com · 17/12/2024
NO WAY! This is nearly EXACTLY one of the paper ideas The AI Scientist came up with! It was my favorite idea it generated, & made us very impressed with its creativity & good taste in an ML paper proposal. Cool to see humans agree! The humans def executed better though. x.com/BrantonDeMos...
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