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UC Berkeley CTO

@ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social
336 followers 244 following 19 posts

Bill Allison — Official account of UC Berkeley’s CTO. Posting about engineering leadership, research, innovation and people management. Go Bears!

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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
A social sciences and humanities reading list on AI in education 🧵
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
ChatGPT for students: learners find creative new uses for chatbots
The utility of generative AI tools is expanding far beyond simple summarisation and grammar support towards more sophisticated, pedagogical applications.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 19/02/2025
One impact of AI coding tools is how they will make “technologies preferred by LLMs” dominant even more. “Build me a mobile app” is much easier to have an LLM do it using React Native or Flutter than native iOS or native Android. So most AI-scaffolded apps will be this!
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 13/02/2025
I filled in this form just now and was emailed an API key a few seconds later, strongly recommend doing the same
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
Startups selected for SkyDeck’s Cohort program will receive a $200,000 investment (for 7.5% equity), access to a network of 500+ advisors/mentors, and the opportunity to pitch to a network of investors on Demo Day. @berkeleyskydeck.bsky.social Apply by 2/18 skydeck.berkeley.edu/apply/
skydeck.berkeley.edu
APPLY – Berkeley SKYDECK
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 13/02/2025
Now that we are 2+ years into the general public having access to ChatGPT-style systems, are there any credible studies out there exploring how susceptible to LLM-generated mistruths users of these things are? Do people tend to develop good instincts on whether they should trust their output?
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
UC Berkeley @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
ICYMI: In fields ranging from AI to health care to Hollywood and beyond, 20 UC Berkeley students, faculty and alumni have been recognized for their achievements on this year’s edition of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. 🌟🐻 news.berkeley.edu/2025/02/07/2...
news.berkeley.edu
20 UC Berkeley alumni, students and faculty shine on Forbes 30 Under 30 list - Berkeley News
Berkeley-affiliated honorees were prominent across the 2025 list's 20 categories.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Kylie Robison @kylierobison.com · 11/02/2025
Scoop: Perplexity has been in negotiations to sign a sponsorship deal with Red Bull Racing, worth $5 million a year. But after both parties had agreed to the terms, the deal was blocked by Oracle, the team’s biggest sponsor. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
theverge.com
Perplexity tried to sponsor an F1 team — but got blocked by a bigger tech company
Oracle blocked Perplexity’s bid to sponsor an F1 team.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
UC Berkeley @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social · 08/02/2025
This UC Berkeley scientist uses satellites to map the Earth’s plant life — and help combat #ClimateChange.🌎 youtu.be/NJLzVEAdExc?...
youtu.be
Professor explains satellite mapping of Earth’s biology |101 in 101
YouTube video by UC Berkeley
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
New UC Federal updates website: “With numerous, quickly evolving federal policy shifts underway, the University of California is working diligently to monitor these developments and seek clarity on a range of issues.“ www.universityofcalifornia.edu/federal-upda...
universityofcalifornia.edu
Federal updates
Learn how UC is closely monitoring updates from the federal government.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
SwiftOnSecurity @swiftonsecurity.com · 06/02/2025
Quick! ChatGPT is down send a litmus test to all your coworkers to see if they actually know anything.
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
It's that time again-- How Do You 💗 Your Data? -- "UC Love Data Week is a week-long offering of presentations and workshops focused on data access, management, security, sharing, and preservation.": uc-love-data-week.github.io
uc-love-data-week.github.io
UC Love Data Week
UC Love Data Week is a week-long offering of presentations and workshops focused on data access, management, security, sharing, and preservation
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 22/01/2025
A government busy carving out tax breaks so non-local multinationals stay: but they leave, anyway (Shell, Unilever). Meanwhile ignoring their own companies that could create a *lot* more local jobs, with some help (ASML). Story of most governments. Including the Dutch:
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
"The Apereo Foundation invites open source enthusiasts, IT professionals, nonprofit staff members, scientific researchers, and open education advocates to our February micro-conference aimed at navigating the complexities of grant funding." www.apereo.org/news/2025/fe...
apereo.org
February Micro-Conference: Unlocking Open Source Grant Funding Opportunities with Josh Baron | Apereo Foundation
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 15/01/2025
Uncanceled Units xkcd.com/3038
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
EDUCAUSE @educause.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Get a comprehensive view into the information lifecycle and hands-on practice with each step from data discovery and evaluation to leading and influencing change through data storytelling. Register for the EDUCAUSE Data Literacy Institute starting February 3!
buff.ly
EDUCAUSE Data Literacy Institute – February 2025
This institute provides foundational knowledge needed to facilitate effective data-informed decision-making.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Oliver M O'Reilly @oliveroreilly.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Excited to see the set of 28 speakers for the 2025 Spring Semester offering of the Brilliance of Berkeley Course. This 1-unit course has in-person lectures on Fridays from 12-2 in Wheeler Auditorium at @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social Further details can be found here: 2ly.link/2217X
Brilliance of Berkeley Course details: https://2ly.link/2217XImage of Professor Dacher KeltnerImage of Professor Randy Schekman
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 14/01/2025
Great work from @johanm.bsky.social, creating a resource connecting people to aid in LA. www.fireaid.info
Screenshot: LA Fire Mutual Aid Resources website.
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
Thoughtful piece on AI and open access by Günter Waibel from the California Digital Library: www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view... @insidehighered.com
insidehighered.com
AI deals underscore importance of open access (opinion)
For those feeling queasy about academic publishers’ AI deals, Günter Waibel and Dave Hansen argue the way forward is not more restrictive licenses—it’s open access.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
Planet Fitness locations in Los Angeles are “offering anyone impacted by the fires—first responders and residents—free access to shower, recharge, and relax” No membership is required to take advantage of locker rooms, WiFi, charging stations at any LA County location not impacted by the fires.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
For the first Platformer of the year, a look at Sam Altman's claim today that OpenAI knows how to make superintelligence now www.platformer.news/openai-agi-s...
platformer.news
OpenAI says it knows how to make superintelligence now
But that might be the easy part
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Tom Warren @tomwarren.co.uk · 07/01/2025
Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs. Four new RTX 50-series GPUs are on the way, including the $1,999 RTX 5090 and $999 RTX 5080. Full details below 👇 www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/243...
theverge.com
Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs
The RTX 50-series is officially here.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Severin Borenstein @severinborenstein.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
#EnergySky A fun and informative blog post from Max Auffhammer to start the Energy Institute blog year. What should the new driver in the family be driving? Maybe not a tank after all. energyathaas.wordpress.com/2025/01/06/g...
energyathaas.wordpress.com
Going Car Shopping With Your Economist Parent
Is the old, heavy clunker strategy still the right call? Happy 2025 (which is not only a square, but also a Harshad number and also the sum of the first 45 odd numbers)! I know you come here for in…
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 06/01/2025
Some rough notes on how I program with LLMs and on how tooling can make it better. crawshaw.io/blog/program...
crawshaw.io
crawshaw - 2025-01-06
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Arvind Narayanan @randomwalker.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
New AI Snake Oil essay: Last month the AI industry's narrative suddenly flipped — model scaling is dead, but "inference scaling" is taking over. This has left people outside AI confused. What changed? Is AI capability progress slowing? We look at the evidence. 🧵 www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-ai-prog...
Declaring the death of model scaling is premature.

Regardless of whether model scaling will continue, industry leaders’ flip flopping on this issue shows the folly of trusting their forecasts. They are not significantly better informed than the rest of us, and their narratives are heavily influenced by their vested interests.

Inference scaling is real, and there is a lot of low-hanging fruit, which could lead to rapid capability increases in the short term. But in general, capability improvements from inference scaling will likely be both unpredictable and unevenly distributed among domains.

The connection between capability improvements and AI’s social or economic impacts is extremely weak. The bottlenecks for impact are the pace of product development and the rate of adoption, not AI capabilities.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Sam Bowman @sleepinyourhat.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
New work from my team at Anthropic in collaboration with Redwood Research. I think this is plausibly the most important AGI safety result of the year. Cross-posting the thread below:
Title card: Alignment Faking in Large Language Models by Greenblatt et al.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 18/12/2024
GitHub added a permanent free tier for GitHub Copilot today, including access to both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. My notes here: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/18/...
simonwillison.net
A new free tier for GitHub Copilot in VS Code
It's easy to forget that GitHub Copilot was the first widely deployed feature built on top of generative AI, with its initial preview launching all the way back in June …
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
The Map Center @mapcenter.com · 17/12/2024
Hi. I'm Andrew. I own New England's oldest map store because last year I moved across the country after an old guy retired and gave it to me Willy Wonka-style. Visit my store in Rhode Island. www.mapcenter.com
A nerd in a teal sweater holding a stack of books about railroads in front of a wall of framed maps.
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 14/12/2024
“In my field, Crispr gene editing and genomics more broadly, we often deal with enormous datasets—or, in many cases, we can’t deal with them properly because we simply don’t have the tools or the time…” -Jennifer Doudna Enter AI, stage left: www.wired.com/story/combin...
wired.com
Combining AI and Crispr Will Be Transformational
The genome-editing technology can be supercharged by artificial intelligence—and the results are already being felt.
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 14/12/2024
"At Middlebury, the percentage of students who admitted on an annual survey to violating the honor code rose from 35 percent in 2019 to 65 percent in 2024." www.chronicle.com/article/chea...
chronicle.com
Cheating Has Become Normal
Faculty members are overwhelmed, and the solutions aren’t clear.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
TechCrunch @techcrunch.com · 09/12/2024
TechCrunch Space: A new world
tcrn.ch
TechCrunch Space: A new world
Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space! To the shock of no one, ever, NASA announced that the next Artemis mission is delayed to no earlier than April 2026, and the subsequent Artemis III mission is delayed to mid-2027. It will be interesting to see…
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Berkeley SkyDeck @berkeleyskydeck.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
📢 Berkeley SkyDeck is hiring a Program Coordinator! What We’re Looking For: Admin with 1 yr experience, communicator & multitasker, detail-oriented team players 📍 Location: Berkeley, CA 💼 Full-time with benefits Apply today! tinyurl.com/SkyDeckCoord...
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
UC Berkeley School of Information @berkeleyischool.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Prof. Deirdre Mulligan was featured in @orcapchronicle.bsky.social, commenting on the influence of AI in meeting rooms and its risk of stifling academic discourse. 📚 🍎 📝 More: www.chronicle.com/article/ai-a...
chronicle.com
AI Assistants Keep Joining Meetings. Administrators Say It’s Out of Control.
The trend marks the latest example of tech development outpacing governance.
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Severin Borenstein @severinborenstein.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
Detailed and thought-provoking article highlighting both the need to reward developing countries for minimizing eco-disruption that increases GHG and the fundamental challenges of paying for offsets. I see no easy answer here. e360.yale.edu/features/ind...
e360.yale.edu
Will New UN Carbon Market Work? Indonesia Will Provide First Test
A U.N. carbon market is expected to open as soon as next year, with carbon-rich Indonesia planning to generate billions of dollars in credits from its vast rainforests. But critics say the trading sys...
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Harry McCracken @harrymccracken.com · 05/12/2024
My first Earthquake Bluesky moment.
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
A global team of astronomers and machine learning researchers announced the release of the "Multimodal Universe" - a groundbreaking 100 terabyte dataset that brings together hundreds of millions of astronomical observations in unprecedented detail and scale. physics.berkeley.edu/news/astrono...
physics.berkeley.edu
Astronomers Release Massive Dataset to Accelerate AI Research in Space Science | Physics
The James Webb Space Telescope; tracks of stars photographed as earth rotates. JWST credit: NASA/Chris Gunn; star rotation image credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/AURA A global team of astronomers and machine lear...
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
An agenda to maximise AI’s benefits and minimise harms, by UC Berkeley’s David Patterson www.economist.com/by-invitatio... from The Economist
economist.com
An agenda to maximise AI’s benefits and minimise harms, by David Patterson
How technologists, researchers and policymakers can reassure people AI will serve the public good
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 26/11/2024
Some notes on the new AWS S3 conditional write feature where you can use an if-match header to avoid over-writing an object if it's been changed since you last read it simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/26/...
simonwillison.net
Amazon S3 adds new functionality for conditional writes
> Amazon S3 can now perform conditional writes that evaluate if an object is unmodified before updating it. This helps you coordinate simultaneous writes to the same object and prevents …
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Wiz is acquiring Dazz.
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UC Berkeley CTO @ucberkeley-cto.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Nice! Cc @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
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Reposted by UC Berkeley CTO
Keith Edwards @keithedwards.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
Bluesky keeps freezing because so many people are trying to use it and I think that’s beautiful
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