Archive for April 2025

OpenAI and many other developers refuse to provide precise details about the training data for their models. Research efforts to reverse engineer some of these datasets have also been stymied by copyright takedowns. When errors are found, there is no easy fix. Simple keyword filtering could deal with specific terms such as vegetative electron microscopy. However, it would also eliminate legitimate references (such as this article). More fundamentally, the case raises an unsettling question. How many other nonsensical terms exist in AI systems, waiting to be discovered?

Recently, the National Institutes of Health abruptly terminated my funding. Their explanation:
“Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness. Worse, so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.”

Letters like this are landing in the inboxes of researchers nationwide. Here’s why this rhetoric is not just misguided, but factually wrong