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Martin Wattenberg

@wattenberg.bsky.social
8.1K followers 1.2K following 416 posts

Human/AI interaction. ML interpretability. Visualization as design, science, art. Research scientist at Google DeepMind.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I fully expect this will be different in a year, and then we will have a whole new set of problems
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Reviewing an AI-written paper is like listening to someone's boring dream
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
And it's not just CHI, and it won't be just this year. I'm pretty sure we'll have to completely redesign the conference ecosystem. It already was getting creaky, but in an AI-powered age, it just doesn't work.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
If you like this kind of thing, there's more at www.instagram.com/martin.images/
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Four dimensions is too many! Let's unfold this 4D cube to three dimensions, then two, and then one. Don't worry, we'll put it back together again. The math is lovely, but it's the rhythm and dance of the lines that fascinates me here.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
btw, I've started an art-only account: www.instagram.com/martin.images/ I'm posting work that's new, as well as old images and some projects that are "restored" (ported from ancient Java). If you're on Instagram, see you there!
A screenshot of my Instagram feed, showing a grid of recent animations and photos.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Yes, that's really frustrating. It definitely shouldn't be a universal basis of conversations about LLMs etc. In 1915, if you were predicting the future of transit, thinking of cars as horses would have been useful. In almost any other context, definitely not useful and maybe even offensive.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Let me say first I wish no one were dismissing you at all! That said, one analogy might be if today you were discussing engines in technical detail. People might in fact insist on using the standard term "horsepower", as deceptive and inaccurate as that term might be as a metaphor.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Saying "machines think" raises unrealistic expectations about what they can do. Yet saying "machines don't think" raises unrealistic expectations about what they cannot do! This dilemma is why I try to focus on capabilities, behavior, consequences when I talk about AI. It's such a tricky area.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
I sympathize with what you're saying, but I feel like definitions that focus on internal process may obscure critical issues around capabilities. Imagine someone in 1800 saying, "Steam engines work by turning heat into pressure. They are not "strong" in any human-comparable way."
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Alberto Acerbi @acerbialberto.com · 12/08/2026
This pattern often noticed for cars seems to hold also for furniture... from: europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/how-col...
Bar chart titled 'Furniture lost its colour: Recently purchased IKEA sofas are more likely to be grey than older ones.' It shows the most common sofa colours per year in IKEA catalogues from 1960 to 2021 as a sequence of coloured vertical stripes. Three callouts highlight the trend: green and blue dominate the 1960s; patterned sofas (stripes, dots, checks) take over in the 1990s, shown as dense black-and-tan patterned bars; and 2011 has the most neutral colours ever. Moving left to right, the bars shift from saturated greens, blues and reds in the 1960s-80s, through heavily patterned dark tones in the 1990s, to blacks and whites in the early 2000s, ending in solid grey and taupe shades through the 2010s to 2021. Source: IKEA catalogues 1960-2021, manual count. Credit: The European Correspondent, Toon Vos.
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Nicolas Lambert @neocarto.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Footbal projections observablehq.com/@mpkhinda/th...
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Baby Name Wizard author Laura Wattenberg @babynames.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
The topic for this article literally came to me in a dream. And honestly, I think my unconscious was onto something. bit.ly/NameSpread
bit.ly
Watch the Influence of a Celebrity Baby Name Spread
What started out as a single name became so much more.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
The one paper I review that desperately needs an ethics discussion is, predictably, the one paper that omits one. Meanwhile, the other papers are utterly innocuous and have long statements that are basically "Air currents created by typing this paper may potentially lead to a hurricane in 2029"
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
This is such a fantastic paper! We need more of this kind of empirical work on what people really do with AI. The idea of the "solipsistic reader-writer" seems important. Also, the paper is so well-written!
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Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
What an amazing way to visualize early human migration. Lovely map by @HarvardCGA. A great colour scheme and an appropriate map projection! Source: buff.ly/3lbxonJ
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
Yes, it's so good! My (adult) daughter insisted we listen to the audio book on a recent family road trip, and after a few minutes of skepticism we were all hooked. But fair warning: too much laughter can make it hard to drive!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Everyone's talking about AI sycophancy and meanwhile ChatGPT just called my writing "very salvageable"
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
As AI capabilities increase, we need a broad, deep, society-wide discussion of what limits make sense, and how we can hold the government meaningfully accountable to citizens. For that reason, I stand with Anthropic and anyone else who is avoiding a rush toward mass AI surveillance.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
That offers governments a vast, unprecedented level of power over their citizens. In evil hands, that’s obviously a disaster. But, like the framers of the US Constitution, I believe it’s also wrong to give absolute powers to democratically elected leaders, or people you think of as the “good guys.”
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
Before now, there was always a natural barrier on the power of surveillance. Even in the limit, if everyone’s actions were recorded all the time, there wouldn’t be enough people and time to watch and analyze the entire footage. But AI threatens to make that natural barrier completely obsolete.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
I want to talk about why AI-based mass surveillance is so dangerous, and why I would oppose it no matter which party or president is in office.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
What a cool idea! And I love the overall aesthetic!
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Santiago Ortiz @moebio.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
This is @garrykasparov.bsky.social versus Deep Blue (game 2). Explore and interact with other games here: moebio.com/chess/ (including fast Hikaru versus Magnus, longest, shortest and oldest games ever!)
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
Fascinating test! See also namerology.com/2025/12/15/2... for a deep dive on one AI name, "Elara". cc @babynames.bsky.social
namerology.com
The 2025 Name of the Year is Elara
She doesn’t exist. Yet she’s everywhere—and she’s all of us.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
I watched an animated movie in Palo Alto in the 90s, and when the credit appeared for a specific piece of graphics software, there was applause from the audience!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
In 2025, AI left its imprint on everything—even names! If you've ever asked an AI to tell you a story, you've probably seen the Elara-Elena-Clara nexus...
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
I want to play with this clever book myself!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
It will hide other names, if you ask!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
Trying this a few more times, it turns out to work only sporadically. But still, that is one observant neural network!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
I asked for a caricature of myself in the style of Al Hirschfeld, and Gemini knew to hide a NINA in my hair 😲
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vrli.bsky.social @vrli.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
Charts and graphs help people analyze data, but can they also help AI? In a new paper, we provide initial evidence that it does! GPT 4.1 and Claude 3.5 describe three synthetic datasets more precisely and accurately when raw data is accompanied by a scatter plot. Read more in🧵!
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Jonathan Zittrain @zittrain.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
AI is often thought of as a black box -- no way to know what's going on inside. That's changing in eye-opening ways. Researchers are finding "beliefs" models are forming as they converse, and how those beliefs correlate to what the models say and how they say it. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
theatlantic.com
What AI Thinks It Knows About You
What happens when people can see what assumptions a large language model is making about them?
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Baby Name Wizard author Laura Wattenberg @babynames.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
The interactive NameGrapher is updated with 2024 baby name popularity stats! Come explore--and marvel that Oliver and Olivia have converged namerology.com/baby-name-gr...
Historical popularity chart showing the popularity of Oliver rising to meet the previously much greater popularity of Olivia
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
A wonderful visualization for those of us obsessed by sunlight and geography!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
An incredibly rich, detailed view of neural net internals! There are so many insights in these papers. And the visualizations of "addition circuit" features are just plain cool!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
Great news, congrats! And glad you’ll still be in the neighborhood!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
I'd be curious about advice on teaching non-coders how to test programs they've written with AI. I'm not thinking unit tests so much as things like making sure you can drill down for verifiable details in a visualization—basic practices that are good on their own, but also help catch errors.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
Now that we have vibe coding, we need vibe testing!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
Oh, that looks super relevant and fascinating, reading through it now...
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
Ha! I think (!) that for me, the word "calculate" connotes narrow precision and correctness, whereas "think" is more expansive but also implies more fuzziness and the possibility of being wrong. That said, your observation does give me pause!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
We're following the terminology of the DeepSeek-R1 paper that introduced this model: arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948 Whether it's really the best metaphor is certainly worth asking! I can see pros and cons for both "thinking" and "calculating"
arxiv.org
DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
We introduce our first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, a model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT)...
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
These are great questions! I believe there's at least one graph of p(correct answer) on the main Arbor discussion page, and generally there are a lot more details: github.com/ARBORproject...
github.com
Reasoning or Performing: locating "breakthrough" in the model's reasoning · ARBORproject arborproject.github.io · Discussion #11
Research Question When asked the DeepSeek models a challenging abstract algebra question, they often generated hundreds of tokens of reasoning before providing the final answer. Yet, on some questi...
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
Interesting question! I haven't calculated this, but @yidachen.bsky.social might know
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
This is a common pattern, but we're also seeing some others! Here are similar views for multiple-choice abstract algebra questions (green is the correct answer; other colors are incorrect answers) You can see many more at yc015.github.io/reasoning-pr... cc @yidachen.bsky.social
Colorful depictions of reasoning progress: most of the time the system settles on the correct answer but sometimes it vacillates in interesting ways.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
Very cool! You're definitely not alone in finding this fascinating. If you're looking for other people interested in this kind of thing, drop by the Arbor Project page, if you haven't already. github.com/ArborProject...
github.com
GitHub - ARBORproject/arborproject.github.io
Contribute to ARBORproject/arborproject.github.io development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
The wind map at hint.fm/wind/ has been running since 2012, relying on weather data from NOAA. We added a notice like this today. Thanks to @cambecc.bsky.social for the inspiration.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
It's based on a data set of multiple-choice questions that have a known right answer, so this visualization only works when you have labeled ground truth. Definitely wouldn't shock me if those answers were labeled by grad students, though!
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
Great questions! Maybe it would be faster... or maybe it's doing something important under the hood that we can't see? I genuinely have no idea.
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
We also see cases where it starts out with the right answer, but eventually "convinces itself" of the wrong answer! I would love to understand the dynamics better.
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