Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles) header
Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles) profile picture

distributed machine learning @ google | sometimes mathematician

Seattle
Joined September 2012
Photo by Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles)Photo by Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles)Photo by Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles)Photo by Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles)Photo by Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles)Photo by Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles)Photo by Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles)Photo by Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles)Photo by Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles)Photo by Zachary Charles (@MatharyCharles)
Zachary Charles retweeted
Tinker’s Dimuon is Muon with delayed diagonal conditioning, Polar Express and a rank-dependent update norm. I recovered its update rule through the API, borrowing @mrtnm’s approach to StableReinforce. Here’s how 🧵
Dimuon is a new optimizer we built for LoRA fine-tuning. In our SFT tests, it often reaches lower loss in fewer steps than AdamW. We're still experimenting with Dimuon; you can Tinker with it today and share your feedback! See our optimizers guide at tinker-docs.thinkingmachines…
14
29
2
338
18,820
I agree with this and adopted this stance unilaterally on a recent review. I encourage you to adopt it in your reviewing — it’s reasonable to write reviews that say “this is dense unreadable slop, my review isn’t detailed and I recommend rejection solely on that basis.”
Some thoughts on reviewing: spylab.ai/blog/reviewing/ First for @satml_conf where we trialed an early reject phase which cut submissions by ~40%. Then more generally about how not everything deserves peer-review, and why we should reward writing things that people actually read.
9
13
6
182
31,372
Zachary Charles retweeted
People really have no idea what string theory is, most have never talked to a string theorist nor bother to read up on it. Its public perception is driven by remarkably confident statements constructing a bogeyman that has nothing to do with the actual research
String theory is what happens when an intelligent system is starved of sensory input and starts hallucinating. Intelligence needs grounding. For this reason, intelligence is practically never the bottleneck to solving impactful problems. The bottleneck is iterated contact with reality.
116
59
11
905
54,451
Zachary Charles retweeted
This website is nothing but anonymous morons.
Replying to @beenwrekt
Insane cope, it's becoming clear why so many of these problems remained unsolved. So-called mathematicians are busy writing bs critique/cope posts like this rather than doing actual math. Lmao.
8
3
125
8,570
Zachary Charles retweeted
Uhhhhh i would have let you install numpy, Claude
43
99
12
5,875
129,415
Zachary Charles retweeted
Wife told me these wouldn’t fit. Little did she know I had trained for this moment for years.
546
20,123
815
361,886
12,016,733
Zachary Charles retweeted
If you want evidence that capitalism is a force for good, just visit a grocery store. My ode to the humble American supermarket, for @WSJFreeEx
2,011
5,288
1,485
39,829
6,597,405
Zachary Charles retweeted
common ml optimization trick: don't show loss curves on wide screens. You model learns slower if you screen is too wide.
34
156
21
3,580
102,300
Why would he make the deficit $1
This quoted post is unavailable.
30
68
1
3,673
97,636
An idea: any paper where all creative mathematical contributions are due to an AI model should be positioned as "an exposition of a proof by Model X". That'd be intellectually honest. It would also add value, rather than DDoS-ing arXiv with daily conjectures. Example below.
I think this kind of rush to put one’s name on duplicative work largely generated by AI is pretty corrosive to the field. Important that we find a way to incentivize work with higher marginal value.
4
14
1
83
11,737
Zachary Charles retweeted
47
1,112
50
30,934
1,403,981
Zachary Charles retweeted
I’ve heard enough, make him president.
13
17
3
447
13,259
Zachary Charles retweeted
Ratioed by Chinese bluegrass fusion
I cannot imagine a Chinese person being emotionally moved by poetry or music
85
2,267
71
29,988
587,340
Zachary Charles retweeted
Genuine LOL
An American interviewer asked Count Binface where he stands on the British political spectrum. 👇
14
532
5
15,707
1,200,476
Zachary Charles retweeted
1/7 Okay, I’ve spent my lunch digesting the paper more and I think Claude didn’t make much of the contribution here. A lot of the key work was of BGSTB24/25 which I was familiar with when these papers released and were pretty big deals.
24
44
12
568
92,376
Zachary Charles retweeted
software engineers in 2026 when you ask them to walk you through their own PR
97
546
63
14,984
965,778
Zachary Charles retweeted
Songlin Yang's video explanations youtube.com/watch?v=d0HJvGSW… youtube.com/watch?v=RTJKXK5L… Songlin Yang's blog post Design intuition sustcsonglin.github.io/blog/… Kernel algorithm (I skipped to "A Chunkwise Algorithm for DeltaNet" section) sustcsonglin.github.io/blog/… FlashKDA github.com/MoonshotAI/FlashK… I prompted Codex to explain it to me, only after that the deep dive made sense github.com/MoonshotAI/FlashK… vLLM serving explanations vllm.ai/blog/2026-07-22-kimi… vllm.ai/blog/2026-07-27-k3#p… The great Zhihu post for explaining AttnRes Training zhihu.com/question/201699309… Inference zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2017528… Jianlin Su's MoE 環遊記 series kexue.fm/tag/moe/1/ Explains the concept of MoE from math first principles Papers Kimi Linear, LatentMoE, Kimi K3 tech report N/
3
72
2
428
37,462
Zachary Charles retweeted
It's nice that the FrontierMath: Open Problems all come with a prospective notability rating from mathematicians. The ratings are highly imperfect, but at least it gives us non-mathematicians a line in the sand. Thread with some (non-mathematical) thoughts on the Astra results.
4
6
49
4,724
Zachary Charles retweeted
I've seen this sentiment from several mathematicians, and it is understandable, but I feel it is also dangerously wrong. I say this because I think mathematicians need to adapt hard and fast, instead of wishing that the disruption from AI will somehow go away. There is a science to large language models and it predicts that with the linear scaling rate we are seeing now, capabilities will increase over the next 5 years at a similar rate as the last 5 years. To get a sense of what that means, one of the main benchmarks 5 years ago was GSM8K, whose questions you can see for yourself at huggingface.co/datasets/open…. There also seems to be a misconception that frontier labs are emphasizing math right now, and spending a lot on solving open math problems, in order to advertise the intelligence of their models. There was some truth to this 7-10 months ago, but that time has passed and most labs are now focused on coding agents. The continued improvements in math are largely a side effect. In the past, the path to a math Ph.D. cultivated resilience, resourcefulness, critical thinking, and a healthy skepticism. These qualities are still needed today, perhaps more than ever, but suddenly you can produce a passable Ph.D. thesis with the push of a button. This signals that the field needs to completely overhaul itself, starting now. My recommendation is that the future role of humans in mathematics, and similar theoretical fields, should be preserving and disseminating knowledge in oral and social forms; written papers will be the domain of AI. Over the coming months I will be involved in workshops that aim to produce more concrete proposals. But people need to come to terms ASAP with the fact that drastic change and compromise are needed to prevent the disenfranchisement of humanity from knowledge work.
When thinking about the longer term impact of AI on math, although AI capabilities will obviously continue to improve, I think there’s a very good chance that in 5-10 years *models available to consumers* will be much worse at advanced math than current frontier models.
41
81
25
564
180,381
Zachary Charles retweeted
Replying to @prz_chojecki
I'm not so sure about the displayed isomorphism between (26) and (27), in the proof of your Theorem 7.1. The justification seems to be just a citation to Theorem 7.2.1 of arxiv.org/pdf/2306.04631, but if you go to that reference you only see a short exact sequence. GPT 5.6's confusion is understandable here, because the Theorem says "which is an isomorphism" after the exact sequence, an obvious grammatical mistake: (which map are they referring to?). But if you check the proofs, it appears to be the rightmost map to the Grothendieck--Witt group, not leftmost map \nu_{d,*}, which is an isomorphism. (For example, in the proof of the previous theorem it is explicitly stated that the map to GW is an epimorphism for j \geq d-3.) P.S. I think you should have quietly checked with experts before publicly declaring a counterexample on X. This is obviously not a venue for serious mathematics and it is highly prone to spreading misinformation, which is harmful for mathematics. P.P.S. Please nobody take this to mean that I am willing to check other AI generated solutions, or that any lack of comment from me represents failure to find an error. I just happened to be kind of interested in this one problem. I have not looked at any of the other claimed AI solutions posted on this website.
5
22
11
302
38,813