Lei M. Zhang
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l32zhang.bsky.social
Lei M. Zhang
@l32zhang.bsky.social
Research Scientist @ Google DeepMind. Previously @ OpenAI. Building AGI. 🤖
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Can't tell you how great it is to finally be able to release and talk about this work, SIMA 2, the next step toward embodied intelligence in rich, interactive 3D worlds!

deepmind.google/sima
SIMA 2: A Gemini-Powered AI Agent for 3D Virtual Worlds
Introducing SIMA 2, the next milestone in our research creating general and helpful AI agents. By integrating the advanced capabilities of our Gemini models, SIMA is evolving from an instruction-foll…
deepmind.google
November 13, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Cool paper using cultural learning to better align culture values in LLMs. Cultural learning ftw! 💪👨‍🏫
🤝 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗟𝗟𝗠𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀?
Get inspiration from humans!🧬🏛️✨ CLCA (Cultural Learning‑based Culture Adaptation) leverages simulated social interactions and intent in culturally rich scenarios to align language models with different values. 🔧

(1/🧵)
July 15, 2025 at 2:06 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Researchers Stephen Jordan and Noah Shutty from Google Quantum AI have devised a new quantum approach to solving problems by treating them like error-free messages. So far, the algorithm has bested all known classical techniques. www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-spee...
March 22, 2025 at 8:04 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Best practices... no wait...
Good enough practices... err... how about
Questionable practices in machine learning https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12220
January 5, 2025 at 9:46 AM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
A brilliant colleague and wonderful soul Felix Hill recently passed away. This was a shock and in an effort to sort some things out, I wrote them down. Maybe this will help someone else, but at the very least it helped me. Rest in peace, Felix, you will be missed. www.janexwang.com/blog/2025/1/...
Felix — Jane X. Wang
From the moment I heard him give a talk, I knew I wanted to work with Felix . His ideas about generalization and situatedness made explicit thoughts that had been swirling around in my head, incohe...
www.janexwang.com
January 3, 2025 at 4:02 AM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Excited to be able to share what I've been up to recently!

We released a new experimental model, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, which shows the thoughts/reasoning it uses to come up with its answers.

Try it out here! aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_...
December 20, 2024 at 1:26 AM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Try out our fresh-from-the-oven thinking model: aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_...

Very cool what these new classes of models are capable of!
December 19, 2024 at 9:53 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Acheulean technology and emergent sociality: what material engagement means for the evolution of human-environment systems link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Acheulean technology and emergent sociality: what material engagement means for the evolution of human-environment systems - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
The Acheulean techno-complex represents a significant chapter in hominin cognitive evolution. Two important developments include enchained technological behaviours that were practiced with broad consi...
link.springer.com
December 13, 2024 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
It’s been a crazy 2 years seeing so many amazingly talented researchers bring GENerative Interactive Environments alive in Genie 1 and 2.

the future is agents in generative environments
Introducing 🧞Genie 2 🧞 - our most capable large-scale foundation world model, which can generate a diverse array of consistent worlds, playable for up to a minute. We believe Genie 2 could unlock the next wave of capabilities for embodied agents 🧠.
December 4, 2024 at 5:53 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Introducing 🧞Genie 2 🧞 - our most capable large-scale foundation world model, which can generate a diverse array of consistent worlds, playable for up to a minute. We believe Genie 2 could unlock the next wave of capabilities for embodied agents 🧠.
December 4, 2024 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion"

(more examples below)
December 1, 2024 at 2:33 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Are there limits to what you can learn in a closed system? Do we need human feedback in training? Is scale all we need? Should we play language games? What even is "recursive self-improvement"?

Thoughts about this and more here:
arxiv.org/abs/2411.16905
Boundless Socratic Learning with Language Games
An agent trained within a closed system can master any desired capability, as long as the following three conditions hold: (a) it receives sufficiently informative and aligned feedback, (b) its covera...
arxiv.org
November 28, 2024 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
we are recruiting interns for a few projects with @pyoudeyer
in bordeaux
> studying llm-mediated cultural evolution with @nisioti_eleni
@Jeremy__Perez

> balancing exploration and exploitation with autotelic rl with @ClementRomac

details and links in 🧵
please share!
November 27, 2024 at 5:43 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Applications are open for student researcher positions at Google DeepMind for 2025! Due date Dec 13

www.google.com/about/career...
Student Researcher, 2025 — Google Careers
www.google.com
November 27, 2024 at 1:17 AM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
During most of the vast history of humanity, technologies have evolved gradually, not through leaps of genius, but slow cultural adaption.

Before the scientific method, easy communication & printed books, innovation happened at the level of societies, not people. www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdf...
November 25, 2024 at 9:19 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Reader, I do not know the demons that haunt your dreams, the frustrations and insults of life that have brought you to your knees, the sadness you battle in your heart.

But know this: there is pure goodness in this world. It exists. Sometime we see a glimpse of it.

Today, I got such a peek.
November 17, 2024 at 5:45 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Just a heads up to everyone: @deep-mind.bsky.social is unfortunately a fake account and has been reported. Please do not follow it nor repost anything from it.
November 25, 2024 at 11:24 PM
Great list of researchers working on making NLP models more culturally aware 🌏!!
Sorry that I’m missing a lot of people. If you’re working on making NLP models more culturally aware, please DM me to be added.
go.bsky.app/tRMpng
November 21, 2024 at 8:43 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
For no particular reason, I really like these starter packs:

Google DeepMind: go.bsky.app/GZ4hZzu
Theoretical CS: go.bsky.app/6A6GRSi
ML Theory: go.bsky.app/21nFz12
Differential Privacy: go.bsky.app/A7ABG83
Google DeepMind Starter Pack
Join the conversation
go.bsky.app
November 21, 2024 at 2:52 AM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
now, if we think of p(output | prompt, a few examples) as a predictive distribution p(y|x, D) ... it looks very much like learning to me :)

see e.g. my slide deck on drive.google.com/file/d/1B-Ka...
November 21, 2024 at 12:43 AM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Beyond excited to introduce AlphaQubit, now published in
Nature!

AlphaQubit is a neural network for quantum error correction and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on simulated and real-world data.
Learning high-accuracy error decoding for quantum processors - Nature
A recurrent, transformer-based neural network, called AlphaQubit, learns high-accuracy error decoding to suppress the errors that occur in quantum systems, opening the prospect of using neural-network...
nature.com
November 20, 2024 at 4:33 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
I'm super excited to share that our work on AlphaQubit, a high accuracy neural network quantum error correction decoder, is now published in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Quantum computing: physics–AI collaboration quashes quantum errors
Machine-learning strategy for quantum error correction.
www.nature.com
November 20, 2024 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Really excited to share our (Google DeepMind and Google QuantumAI) new publication in @Nature, where we use neural networks to identify errors in quantum computers with state-of-the-art accuracy.
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Blog: blog.google/technology/g...
Learning high-accuracy error decoding for quantum processors - Nature
A recurrent, transformer-based neural network, called AlphaQubit, learns high-accuracy error decoding to suppress the errors that occur in quantum systems, opening the prospect of using neural-network...
www.nature.com
November 20, 2024 at 4:31 PM
Reposted by Lei M. Zhang
Now that @jeffclune.bsky.social and @joelbot3000.bsky.social are here, time for an Open-Endedness starter pack.

go.bsky.app/MdVxrtD
November 20, 2024 at 7:08 AM