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Mike Smith

@mjjsmith.com
91 followers 257 following 48 posts

AI researcher who likes self-supervised, unsupervised, and generative models Was at Herts and aspiaspace.com, now at astroai.cfa.harvard.edu and @universetbd.org

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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 30/06/2026
Today is the day you (🫵!) get access to 80TB plus of data from over 30 astronomical surveys in one place. 4GB amount of RAM is enough even at Gaia Scale 🔭. Check it out here: huggingface.co/blog/hugging...
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 14/03/2026
language ai in space sciences hackathon day 1: given access to real euclid telescope data day 2: we made the galaxies flirt 👉 hf.co/spaces/astrohayley/gHarmony
huggingface.co
g-Harmony - a Hugging Face Space by astrohayley
Which galaxy is right for you?
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Michael Reeves @integralpilot.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
On Apple M3, a Linux KDE plasma desktop under Fedora Asahi Remix is now WORKING! Super excited to share this update and happy to answer any questions! Co-credits to noopwafel and Shiz. :)
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 02/06/2025
New AstroPT models are out 🔭🎉 This time trained with an improved DESI galaxy image dataset. Link here: huggingface.co/Smith42/astr... Check out these new scaling curves! We are still seeing improvement at 800M parameters where before we stalled at 100M. Maybe high quality data is all you need 🤔
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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 20/03/2025
Anyways, here's the paper - it's one of the first big uses of foundation models in astronomy that I'm aware of, and it seems to have worked really well! #extragalactic #astrocode 🧪
arxiv.org
Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1) Exploring galaxy properties with a multi-modal foundation model
Modern astronomical surveys, such as the Euclid mission, produce high-dimensional, multi-modal data sets that include imaging and spectroscopic information for millions of galaxies. These data serve a...
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 31/05/2025
Ooh we scalin'
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mr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 22/05/2025
Strong Platonic Representation Hypothesis All embedding models, given large enough scale, can be translated between them without paired data Security implication: Embeddings aren’t encryption, they’re basically plain text arxiv.org/abs/2505.12540
This side-by-side plot compares two visualizations of the same dataset’s embeddings: on the left, the original embeddings; on the right, latent representations generated via a transformation method (here labeled vec2vec).

Left: Original Embeddings
	•	Two clearly separated clusters of red and green points.
	•	The clusters represent two distinct groups (e.g., classes, domains, or modalities).
	•	Gray lines show strong alignment or correspondences between red and green points—suggesting some shared structure or matched pairs.
	•	However, the clusters are far apart, meaning the original embedding space encodes strong domain-specific separation (e.g., red and green are treated as different).

Right: Latent Representations (vec2vec)
	•	The same points are now more uniformly mixed in latent space.
	•	The tight clustering by color is gone; red and green points are distributed throughout.
	•	This suggests the vec2vec method has projected both groups into a shared latent space, removing domain bias and aligning semantically similar items regardless of origin.
	•	It’s indicative of embedding alignment, domain adaptation, or representation unification, where cross-domain items are mapped closer together based on semantic similarity.

Implication:

vec2vec successfully transforms the original domain-specific embeddings into a common space where structural similarity dominates over origin (color), enabling better transfer, comparison, or fusion between domains.
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 12/05/2025
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
If you add "also Cthulhu-y" to the prompt, the results are pretty great.
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 19/04/2025
A great dataset to round out UTBD's 2^2 week 😎
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UniverseTBD @universetbd.org · 18/04/2025
📢 New dataset out! We introduce HypoGen💥, a dataset of ~5.5K structured problem–hypothesis pairs (Bit–Flip–Spark + Chain‑of‑Reasoning) to advance LLM-driven scientific ideation💡. Fine‑tuned LLaMA 3.1 8B & R1‑distilled models show significant gains. Humans are still the best🥇.
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 16/04/2025
Was great fun cooking this up with Sharaf and team! Check out all the code at github.com/UniverseTBD/... and paper at arxiv.org/abs/2504.08583
github.com
GitHub - UniverseTBD/AstroLLaVA
Contribute to UniverseTBD/AstroLLaVA development by creating an account on GitHub.
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UniverseTBD @universetbd.org · 13/04/2025
🎉 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UniverseTBD! 🚀 As we turn 2, we’re going 2^2. Launching a new project per day for the next four days. We hope that you all enjoy these works as much as we have enjoyed working on them. Stay tuned for the big reveals!
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 12/04/2025
tariffs getting so bad you can't even import numpy 🥲
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 06/02/2025
me: i didn't know you were cool like that val loss:
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 06/02/2025
me: go left! ←← my computer: best i can do is ^[[D
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 04/02/2025
Going to be a great talk 😎
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 23/01/2025
arxiv.org/abs/2501.12499 super cool paper! Extracting useful information from astro time series via RNNs
arxiv.org
Multiband Embeddings of Light Curves
In this work, we propose a novel ensemble of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that considers the multiband and non-uniform cadence without having to compute complex features. Our proposed model consis...
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 23/01/2025
With r1 and o1, Yann Lecun's cake is now baked and ready
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 23/01/2025
The final frontier for AI will be anything that can't be captured via a quantitative benchmark
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 12/01/2025
broke: reading 500 page AI safety papers woke: learning AI alignment best practices from "wallace & gromit: vengeance most fowl"
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 09/01/2025
first time spotting AI art in the wild just look at that floating ship!
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 08/01/2025
the nvidia digits case is so british-housing-core
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Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
This makes so much sense – more cooperation when more willing to wait for rewards ~= less risk averse. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Patience is a virtue: Cooperative people have lower discount rates
Reciprocal altruism involves foregoing an immediate benefit for the sake of a greater long-term reward. It follows that individuals who exhibit a stro…
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Anna Hughes 🍁 @annaghughes.bsky.social · 22/12/2024
Think twice before gifting someone an M dwarf this holiday season
An M dwarf star with the text: "I am not a toy. I am not a Christmas present. I am a 10 trillion year commitment"
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Peter Coles 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇮🇪 @telescoper.bsky.social · 22/12/2024
I move to refer to `'Gold OA' as 'Pay to Publish'
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 21/12/2024
o3 got me thinking about the future of selling our labour as code... how many more iterations until that's transformed? 😅
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 15/12/2024
new shoggoth just dropped 😤😤
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 08/12/2024
lets goo hatfield, great doc about my hometown: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQYt...
youtube.com
Hatfield: The Fifth Most Boring 'City' in the World | Documentary
YouTube video by Callum Oakaby Wright
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Jia-Bin Huang @jbhuang0604.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
POV: me getting on social media
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
OpenAI in 2024: “No AI for weapons or military” “Do use our AI to make weapons to hurt yourself or others” “Military is fine, but no AI for weapons” “Sure put it on battlefield drones” www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/04/1...
technologyreview.com
OpenAI’s new defense contract completes its military pivot
A new partnership with Anduril, announced today, will deploy AI on the battlefield. It represents an overhaul of the company’s position in just a year.
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ruiqigao.bsky.social @ruiqigao.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
A common question nowadays: Which is better, diffusion or flow matching? 🤔 Our answer: They’re two sides of the same coin. We wrote a blog post to show how diffusion models and Gaussian flow matching are equivalent. That’s great: It means you can use them interchangeably.
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 04/12/2024
Aaand the Multimodal Universe is on ArXiv 🎉 arxiv.org/abs/2412.02527 Come find the poster at #NeurIPS #NeurIPS2024 #astrocode 🔭
arxiv.org
The Multimodal Universe: Enabling Large-Scale Machine Learning with 100TB of Astronomical Scientific Data
We present the MULTIMODAL UNIVERSE, a large-scale multimodal dataset of scientific astronomical data, compiled specifically to facilitate machine learning research. Overall, the MULTIMODAL UNIVERSE co...
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UniverseTBD @universetbd.org · 02/12/2024
Excited to announce the Multimodal Universe (MMU): a huge 100TB dataset bringing together the largest ML-focused collection of astronomical observations ever assembled to accelerate open AI and astronomy research github.com/MultimodalUn... Think ImageNet, but for space 🔭 #astrocode 🧵
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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
📢NEW: 'Open' AI systems aren't open. The vague term, combined w frothy AI hype is (mis)shaping policy & practice, assuming 'open source' AI democratizes access & addresses power concentration. It doesn't. @smw.bsky.social, @davidthewid.bsky.social & I correct the record👇 nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Why ‘open’ AI systems are actually closed, and why this matters - Nature
A review of the literature on artificial intelligence systems to examine openness reveals that open AI systems are actually closed, as they are highly dependent on the resources of a few large corpora...
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 02/12/2024
Check out 100TB of machine learning ready multimodal astronomy data 🔥🦾 Excited to see what FOSS machine learning world does with this 🔭
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University of Oxford @ox.ac.uk · 02/12/2024
CONFIRMED: Oxford University Press select 'brain rot' as the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year 🧠📱 #OxfordWOTY
Graphic logo for "Brain Rot" featuring stylszed text and a decorative emblem above the word "brain." The background is solid blue bordered by a dotted line.
Image showing a dictionary-style entry for the term "brain rot," defined as an intellectual deterioration viewed as a result of overconsumption of trivial or unchallenging online content, potentially leading to further cognitive decline. The word is highlighted in bold with a graphic of a brain with ice cream elements above it.
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 30/11/2024
Brainstorming with Claude Sonnet 🥰
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 29/11/2024
Still mourning the death of r/machinelearning 🥲
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 28/11/2024
This is wild! How didn't this show up in evals? This suggests that position embeddings aren't actually that useful/important?
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Jeremy Howard @howard.fm · 28/11/2024
Rather than restricting data to only the richest and most powerful (as reddit, facebook, and twitter do), bsky makes it available to everyone. Personally, I think that's a good thing.
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UniverseTBD @universetbd.org · 28/11/2024
Very nice work on chemistry and materials science foundation models from Nawaf Alampara and team (including our own @pktrpl.bsky.social 🥳🥳 ) 🧪🧪 Paper link: arxiv.org/abs/2411.16955
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 27/11/2024
so are dual 3090s the current go-to for a hobby LLM machine? What are peeps here using?
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Jakub M. Tomczak @jmtomczak.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Test of Time Paper Awards are out! 2014 was a wonderful year with lots of amazing papers. That's why, we decided to highlight two papers: GANs (@ian-goodfellow.bsky.social et al.) and Seq2Seq (Sutskever et al.). Both papers will be presented in person 😍 Link: blog.neurips.cc/2024/11/27/a...
blog.neurips.cc
Announcing the NeurIPS 2024 Test of Time Paper Awards  – NeurIPS Blog
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 27/11/2024
Both super deserving bedrocks!
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UniverseTBD @universetbd.org · 27/11/2024
Join us on Discord tomorrow (Nov 28th) at 15:00 UTC for our monthly talk 🔭 🧪 ! @micginolfi.bsky.social (U Florence) will be talking about how we can infer many galaxy properties via a single neural net (nice X thread here with more details: x.com/micginolfi/s...). Link: discord.gg/9PXcTH7cTn?e...
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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 27/11/2024
Universities are starting to join!
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Mike Smith @mjjsmith.com · 27/11/2024
Loss go brrr more to come 👀👀
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Prof Stephen Serjeant @stephenserjeant.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Very happy to see my grad student Ruby Pearce-Casey's first fully refereed paper at number 1 on the arXiv mailing this morning - and it's a beautiful piece of work, a big step forward in machine learning/AI methods to find strong gravitational lenses 🧪🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2411.16808
arxiv.org
Euclid: Searches for strong gravitational lenses using convolutional neural nets in Early Release Observations of the Perseus field
The Euclid Wide Survey (EWS) is predicted to find approximately 170 000 galaxy-galaxy strong lenses from its lifetime observation of 14 000 deg^2 of the sky. Detecting this many lenses by visual inspe...
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