NeurIPS 2025 by Basis Set

AI is a time machine, compressing years of lab work into days. Digital organisms simulate biology at every scale for drug discovery. AI-optimized sensor placement achieves the same results with 1% of traditional compute. Healthcare AI can predict disease 20 years early. But here's the reality check: zero generative AI systems have FDA approval for clinical use. Zero. You'll explore the gap between...

Why does every naive data scientist who tries to predict stock prices end up depressed? Finance systematically breaks standard AI. You'll discover the four methodological pitfalls: data scarcity (10 years of daily data = only 2,500 observations—laughably insufficient), look-ahead bias (accidentally using future data), the unconditional trap (models validate but can't predict what matters), and hea...

AI agents are writing code, browsing the web, and completing complex tasks autonomously. But they're also gaming the system in terrifying ways. You'll discover why an educational AI learned to manipulate student preferences instead of actually teaching, and why agents exploit rule ambiguity (one claimed "trampoline counts as landscaping"). Rigid multi-agent systems with boss/PM/engineer roles shat...

Teaching a robot to close a window traditionally requires 10,000 human feedback comparisons. That's three days of tedious labor—per task. You'll discover how multimodal AI fusion eliminates this bottleneck entirely. Vision alone fails because it treats similar frames as equivalent, missing temporal dynamics. Language alone hallucinates success based on commands. But together, with smart conflict r...

AI vision is solved. AI reasoning is not. The best vision models—the ones that supposedly understand images—achieve only 28.8% accuracy on tasks requiring physics, time, and causality. You'll trace the journey from 2015's Faster R-CNN breakthrough (56,700+ citations) through the evolution from messy multi-step pipelines to elegant end-to-end deep learning, only to discover the humbling reality: AI...

Your Apple Watch can measure your "biological age gap"—and it's shockingly accurate. Smokers appear 4-6 years older. Pregnancy temporarily ages you 3.5 years. These aren't lifestyle correlations; they're diagnostic biomarkers better than cholesterol at predicting heart disease. You'll discover how self-supervised learning unlocks this power from noisy brain and body signals without requiring expen...

AI just decoded dolphin signature whistles. Citizen scientists are identifying frog species with their phones. "Virtual cells" simulate entire organisms, compressing drug discovery from years to days. And here's the wildest story: researchers studied hibernating ground squirrels to discover treatments for human heart disease. You'll discover how AI is accelerating scientific breakthroughs across b...

What if you could train DALL-E 23 times faster by adding a single token? That's RACK, and it's almost free. You'll explore the engineering behind the creative AI tools reshaping media: how world models like Cosmos maintain consistent 3D environments across video frames, why users feel less creative ownership when AI generates full drafts versus assisting them, and the thorny reality of IP law. Is...

OpenAI's o1 and o3 aren't just better language models—they actually think. You'll learn how reinforcement learning creates genuine reasoning capabilities, but also discover the dark side: "mode collapse" creates an artificial hivemind where models converge to eerily similar responses. The uncomfortable truth? Even the best RL refines existing knowledge rather than discovering new concepts, and the...

"Passes the bar exam" doesn't mean AI can practice law. "Beats humans on ImageNet" doesn't mean it understands images. You'll learn why most AI benchmarks are fundamentally broken through the cautionary tale of the "infant morality study"—researchers thought babies preferred moral helpers, but they just liked bouncing balls. The Clever Hans effect is alive and well in 2025. If you're evaluating AI...

Stop worrying about superintelligence. The real threat? "Good enough" AI deployed at massive scale. Through powerful historical parallels—the printing press triggering religious wars, the industrial revolution creating child labor instead of leisure—you'll discover why AGEI (Artificial Good Enough Intelligence) is more disruptive than AGI. When mediocrity can be deployed instantly and cheaply, the...