iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Students sometimes ask me if it still makes sense, in this accelerating age, to pursue a PhD in AI. Perhaps counterintuitively, I think it's a great time to do so. I wrote up some thoughts on this here: web.mit.edu/phillipi/www...

web.mit.edu

On the Value of Doing a PhD in the Age of AI

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Recently, there have been a lot of impressive demos of AI agents, like Claude, controlling robots. I wrote a short blog post with my thoughts on the advent of these "robot-use agents." web.mit.edu/phillipi/www... I think it's an important change in the trajectory of robotics!

web.mit.edu

Robot-use agents

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

This very nice paper provides some useful pushback against PRH. To me science is like a damped pendulum, where we need to swing back and forth a few times before converging on truth. So don't worry PRH fans, I'll be trying to swing us back out of the cave again soon!

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Sharing “Neural Thickets”. We find: In large models, the neighborhood around pretrained weights can become dense with task-improving solutions. In this regime, post-training can be easy; even random guessing works Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.12228 Web: thickets.mit.edu 1/

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

The AI discourse sometimes seems to center on "Is AI good or is it bad?" I find this framing unproductive. AI is not a fixed thing. I would prefer to ask "How might we use this technology for good, and mitigate the bad?" What a shame if the best use we can come up with is no use at all.

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Lance Ying @lanceying.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Today we present a new framework for measuring human-like general intelligence in machines: studying how and how well they play and learn to play all conceivable human games compared to humans. We then propose the AI Gamestore a way to sample from popular human games to evaluate AI models.

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Our grad-level "Deep Learning" course (MIT's 6.7960) is now freely available online through OpenCourseWare: ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-79... Lecture videos, psets, and readings are all provided. Had a lot of fun teaching this with @sarameghanbeery.bsky.social and @jeremybernste.in!

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Super accessible write up on what we and others have been up to on representational convergence in AI models, and the platonic representation hypothesis, along with contrary views. I'm a big fan of Quanta Magazine, so it was very cool to see them cover this!

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Impromptu NeurIPS meetup: "representational convergence by the beach." We will meet at ballroom 20c (near lunch) 2pm Fri and walk over to Marina. Will chat about platonic reps, fractured reps, or anything else about where all these models are heading. Anyone is welcome to join!

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Shiry Ginosar @shiryginosar.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

Join us TODAY for the 3rd Perception Test Challenge perception-test-challenge.github.io @iccv.bsky.social Ballroom B, Full day Amazing lineup of speakers: Ali Farhadi, @alisongopnik.bsky.social, Phlipp Krahenbul, @phillipisola.bsky.social

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Over the past year, my lab has been working on fleshing out theory + applications of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Today I want to share two new works on this topic: Eliciting higher alignment: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02425 Unpaired learning of unified reps: arxiv.org/abs/2510.08492 1/9

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

Interesting reaction from ChatGPT to the HHS mRNA memo. It finds it so implausible that it thinks it's fake. From the perspective of a ~2024(?) trained model, 2025 policies are so absurd as to be unbelievable... chatgpt.com/share/689364...

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#CVPR2026 @cvprconference.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

#CVPR2025 provided coaching for all orals. Do you think the talks were improved compared to last year? * Better than last year * About the same * Worse than last year Share your thoughts in the thread!

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Our computer vision textbook is now available for free online here: visionbook.mit.edu We are working on adding some interactive components like search and (beta) integration with LLMs. Hope this is useful and feel free to submit Github issues to help us improve the text!

visionbook.mit.edu

Foundations of Computer Vision

The print version was published by

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Reposted by Phillip Isola

#CVPR2026 @cvprconference.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

Behind every great conference is a team of dedicated reviewers. Congratulations to this year’s #CVPR2025 Outstanding Reviewers! cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/...

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Reposted by Phillip Isola

Greta Tuckute @gretatuckute.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

PINEAPPLE, LIGHT, HAPPY, AVALANCHE, BURDEN Some of these words are consistently remembered better than others. Why is that? In our paper, just published in J. Exp. Psychol., we provide a simple Bayesian account and show that it explains >80% of variance in word memorability: tinyurl.com/yf3md5aj

tinyurl.com

APA PsycNet

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

Lots of different definitions of reasoning floating around. How about this? Reasoning is planning in knowledge space. Planning = find a sequence of actions that achieves a goal. Reasoning = find a sequence of inferences that answers a query. Then it's no surprise that RL can amortize both.

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Something I don't quite understand: deepseek showed that each gpu is more valuable than we thought. You can do more with fewer. So why did chip stocks crash? Is it because people assume that AI demand will satiate at a certain level of intelligence? Or is there some other explanation

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

When I was a kid I was fascinated by SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intellitence. Now we live in an era when it is becoming meaningful to search for "extraterrestrial life" not just in our universe but in simulated universes as well. This project provides new tools toward that dream:

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Shobhita Sundaram @shobsund.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Personal vision tasks–like detecting *your mug*--are hard; they’re data scarce and fine-grained. In our new paper, we show you can adapt general-purpose vision models to these tasks from just three photos! 📝: arxiv.org/abs/2412.16156 💻: github.com/ssundaram21/... (1/n)

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

At NeurIPS this year my lab is sharing a few papers and talks. They are all about the following question: how to characterize the geometry of deep learning problems, and in particular how to measure *distance*? Each paper/talk gives a rather different answer, detailed below:

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Making a lecture on inference methods for deep nets. Here is my attempt at mapping out the interplay between training and inference. A few items I wasn't sure where to put. You could break it down differently. What did I get wrong?

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Sharing some new work! A big dream in AI is to create world models of sufficient quality that you can train agents within them. Classic simulators lack visual diversity and realism. GenAI lacks physical accuracy. But combining the two can work pretty well! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2411.00083

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Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

I think I will start posting about research, and maybe other thoughts, here. Hope we can get a critical mass like there was on science Twitter!

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