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Nando de Freitas
@NandoDF
I seek to understand intelligence, agency and awareness, and build AI aligned with compassion, freedom, universal human empowerment, and progress science.
London, England
scholar.google.com/citations?user…
Joined April 2009
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110.7K
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  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Sep 7, 2024
    The Llama 3 paper is a must-read for anyone in AI and CS. It’s an absolutely accurate and authoritative take on what it takes to build a leading LLM, the tech behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and others. The AI part might seem small in comparison to the gargantuan work on *data*
    user avatar
    Soumith Chintala
    Thinking Machines
    @soumithchintala
    Jul 23, 2024
    Why do 16k GPU jobs fail? The Llama3 paper has many cool details -- but notably, has a huge infrastructure section that covers how we parallelize, keep things reliable, etc. We hit an overall 90% effective-training-time. ai.meta.com/research/publi…
    160K
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Aug 17, 2024
    Hmmm, from what I see my colleagues in AI at Google London work bloody long ours and are extremely committed. This guy once came to London and told us to abandon Torch and use TensorFlow. That set the field of AI back by at least 6 months.
    This Post is from an account that no longer exists. Learn more
    415K
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Oct 19, 2024
    I’ve walked through poor neighbourhoods in India, Africa and LatAm many times. Yet, I recently walked through one of the most depressing ones in terms of poverty, drug abuse, and sheer hopelessness: San Francisco. Giant tech AI companies promise to make the world a better
    683K
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Sep 9, 2019
    I believe I have written more papers than Alan Turing + John Nash! Numbers of papers alone is a wrong misleading metric. Please focus instead on writing good papers that advance the field, help the world, and that you’ll be proud of when you look back in 20 or 50 years.
    user avatar
    Stanford NLP Group
    @stanfordnlp
    Sep 8, 2019
    Yes, @GoogleAI (well, all of @AlphabetInc) produces a lot of awesome AI research, but @Stanford + @MIT together produce more (judging by @NeurIPSConf papers!), and @Stanford + @MIT + @UCBerkeley + @CarnegieMellon produces more than @AlphabetInc + @Microsoft + @facebook
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Sep 13, 2024
    It’s time to say thank you and goodbye to @GoogleDeepMind. I had the immense fortune of working there for 10 years. They were undoubtedly the most exciting years in the history of AI, and I feel that I grew beyond all my expectations thanks to my uniquely smart, generous and
    129K
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Dec 19, 2020
    Can AI researchers please tweet: I am against racism, sexism, bullying and cancelling, and I believe in improving diversity, equity and inclusion in our AI community. We need to hear your voices! The students and the public need to know what most believe.
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Apr 20, 2025
    RL is not all you need, nor attention nor Bayesianism nor free energy minimisation, nor an age of first person experience. Such statements are propaganda. You need thousands of people working hard on data pipelines, scaling infrastructure, HPC, apps with feedback to drive
    114K
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Nov 12, 2025
    I still remember that 2013 @NeurIPSConf party with Mark Zuckerberg. He had a bottle of water at that first Neurips corporate party. I thought it was out of character for a Neurips party - what was the matter with this kid? And why did he speak like that? We were so naive! …
    275K
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Jul 7, 2019
    View point invariance is an important inductive bias in how we perceive objects - here tested to the limit by a smart artist.
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Mar 25, 2024
    There appears to be a mismatch between publishing criteria in AI conferences and "what actually works". It is easy to publish new mathematical constructs (e.g. new models, new layers, new modules, new losses), but as Apple's MM1 paper concludes: 1. Encoder Lesson: Image
    313K
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Apr 3, 2021
    Mike Jordan defending ML engineering! Good engineering gave us the GPU convnets, the transformers, torch, numpy, etc. The popular diminishing meme “it’s-just-engineering” is silly, and holds us back. I ❤️ creative, rigorous, robust, safe engineering.
    Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says
    From flip.it
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Sep 16, 2024
    I’ve joined @Microsoft AI to advance the frontier of large scale multimodal AI research and to build products for people to achieve meaningful goals and dreams. The MAI team is small, but well resourced and ambitious. We are now looking for exceptional ICs, who like to ship. If
    109K
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    May 9, 2022
    Game over. Scale is essential to AI.
  • user avatar
    Nando de Freitas
    @NandoDF
    Feb 4, 2023
    Nvidia released the megatron language model before the pandemic. It’s amazing how influential this paper became. A must read for people wanting to learn about AI.
    arXiv logo
    arxiv.org
    Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models...
    Recent work in language modeling demonstrates that training large transformer models advances the state of the art in Natural Language Processing applications. However, very large models can be...
    254K