
Assistant Prof. @ChicagoBooth | OM & Applied AI | Most Cited Paper: Neural Collapse in AI Training | BSE @Princeton, PhD @Cornell, MS/PostDoc @Stanford
Chicago, IL
Joined November 2011
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XY Han retweeted
I’ve lately been getting emails from prospective grad students with detailed questions about my papers and proposed approaches to extend them.
Sorry, not impressed. A year or two ago, I might have been, but somehow it’s never happened until now… 🤔
XY Han retweeted
One feature of Vibed ML papers is that they do some cool hack in Section 3-4 and then Section 5 is called “Theoretical Analysis” as if we understood how any of this works.
XY Han retweeted
I have always admired people who know how to listen. Especially those who can listen to my entire explanation of why they’re wrong.
XY Han retweeted
Here is why both of you are wrong (joking; both of you are right, to a degree).
Yitang should be regarded as one of the very rare cases.
In a lot of situations, meritocracy alone fails in academia. We are at the mercy of senior people and rely on recommendation letters, etc., to survive.
Most other talented people would have given up academia given the treatment. The game is rigged.
But roughly once in a million chances, someone can be self-made, and that was Yitang.
Wait so let me get this straight. A bad coach instructs a high jumper in the straddle technique. The athlete listens, gets nowhere. The athlete leaves school and flips burgers to make ends meet, while continuing to read about a new Fosbury flop technique. The athlete trains and masters it all by himself, goes back out and gets a gold medal.
Me: see? The sport is meritocratic. And what an amazing story of human perseverance against all odds.
You: it’s all a sham.
🤷♂️
Okay.
XY Han retweeted
WE MIGHT HAVE JUST GOTTEN THE FIRST SIGN OF GPT-6.5!
The domain opensi.lol has a hidden "6.5" in its source code and a countdown to November 1, 10AM SF time. That's exactly Day 28 of Tibo's 28 days.
Either this is the biggest troll of the week, or someone knows something we don't.
XY Han retweeted
oh deepseek released again? must all be distillation. distillation plays an even bigger role than expected, you say? wow, crazy how easy it is to make temu frontier just by handing money over to frontier! what a terrible business. i mean, no, great business. it's definitely winner-takes-all! totally.
XY Han retweeted
I recommended desk rejections (DR) for 5 out of 14 submissions, as an #ICLR2027 Area Chair.
Story behind this: I did not use any LLM detection tools, which are unnecessary and should not be used for judging DR. These submissions shared some shockingly basic problems in scientific writing, and therefore each paper only took me about 10 mins (thank God) to identify and report the issues.
1. Undefined jargon. Writing 101: Your paper must be self-contained. If a term isn't standard knowledge in the field, it should be defined.
2. Not analyzing or pretending to analyze results. Experimental analysis is about providing insights, not simply repeating numbers from figures and tables. Bro, I can read the numbers myself.
3. Missing citations. Scientific claims need support, either from existing literature or in-paper empirical evidence. Fewer than three citations in an entire introduction? Either the work is a once-in-a-century masterpiece, or the claims are hallucinated in the paper.
My biggest concern isn't whether these papers were written using LLMs. It's that some submissions fail to meet the most basic standards of scientific communication and therefore should not be reviewed.
Considering this has already wasted some reviewers' time, I strongly recommend introducing AI to flag such papers at an earlier stage.
Thanks for ICLR's policy on desk rejections. Hope this can save some time for the responsible reviewers.
XY Han retweeted
The reason that this tweet is so annoying to me is that OpenAI and Anthropic are playing a double game. On one hand, they tell us there is massive distillation by Chinese labs, that this proves they are far ahead, and that those labs should be restricted because it is simply not fair.
On the other hand, they refuse to show any evidence. They could. They could say: here are the benchmarks, here is how we detect it, here is our estimate of how much distillation happened. Then we could have a discussion based on facts.
Instead, they just say, " Trust us; it is very severe. And, based on that, trust us to block and restrict the competitors." That is not a fair argument.
And all of this is before we even get to the question of whether distillation is a problem at all. Companies have always copied and taken inspiration from each other. OpenAI and Anthropic built their models by distilling the entire internet. But that is a separate discussion.
XY Han retweeted
too many companies give out hats as company swag. not enough socks.
- i wear socks every day, i wear hats rarely
- i wear birks so everyone will see your logo
- it's winter, it's cold, i need more socks urgently
XY Han retweeted
Expanding on yesterday's single-sentence macro model, here's a longer version, trying to explain the key themes of macroeconomics as exchange among farmers in a village:
tecunningham.github.io/posts…
XY Han retweeted
Coffee has always been part of the explanation for why people are smart. But one of my updates after joining Starbucks is that coffee probably plays a bigger role than I realized.
(People will say I'm only saying this because I work at Starbucks, but it really is true)



































