Christopher Manning

Worth reading before making wildly optimistic AI predictions! x.com/dan_jeffries1/…

My Zhilin number is 1.

“We should not have models with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that are free to download” “Actually, open weight and open source AI models are what will keep you safe!” “Wait, someone seems to have changed the narrative….” “Looks like it was … [checks news] @OpenAI!” x.com/clementdelangu…

I remember @MarkSchmidtUBC very fondly from @CIFAR_News meetings as a quiet expert. Science has the egos and the egoless. x.com/srush_nlp/stat…

Photographic evidence back from @icmlconf 2026 in Seoul! @houjun_liu reunites with @robert_csordas for the presentation of our work on Thoughtbubbles. And surely that must be the back of @JulieKallini’s head in the foreground? x.com/sislaboratory/…

There are 1000s of AI papers on benchmarks. Nearly all are on the design of scientific benchmarks. Our new @PNASNews paper addresses the institutional context. What happens when consumers & regulators use benchmarks? How should the system be designed? pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Thanks to @NeelGuha for taking the lead on this paper. Great working with him, Andy Zhang, @christinestsang, @JulianNyarko, and Dan Ho. Article is available open access!

Excited to see the Law in the Age of Generative AI special feature in @PNASNews! AI Safety & Copyright, but also AI Governance, Statutory Interpretation & more! My idea, but big thanks to Dan Ho, @JulianNyarko, @vanessaparli & @PNASNews for their work! pnas.org/topic/584

I first embarked on work at the boundary of NLP and Law around 2008, with @msurd, @nmramesh, Josh Walker, George Gregory, & Mark Lemley. We wrote papers like: t.co/U0pXMcjZ5b , launched a startup, @LexMachina, and our data contributed to discussion and reform of patenting during the @BarackObama administration: t.co/kHCmWdWuly . But, overall, honestly, very few people were interested in using empirical AI/ML/NLP techniques to study Law around 2010…. It’s wonderful to see how things have changed and grown during the last 15 years! Especially the last 5.

I would too! I have written very few papers solo in the 21st century and I’m quietly pleased with how all of them have aged. 💅 Probabilistic syntax 2003 t.co/JuqKO3Czz0 Local Textual Inference: It’s hard to circumscribe, but you know it when you see it – and NLP needs it 2006 t.co/E1aCytwSgJ Part-of-speech tagging from 97% to 100%: Is it time for some linguistics? 2011 t.co/avB50bILQo Last words: Computational linguistics and deep learning 2015 t.co/8Iqd7RGb3C Human language understanding & reasoning 2022 t.co/mXIYSRNA0O

The enormous progress in enterprise-useful AI – across multiple industry domains – is being driven by large investments in industry-specific training and evaluation data. Only bits of that data are openly available. Great to see this higher quality open finance benchmark from @samaya_AI!

“Linguistics is an unsung hero among sciences. It has initiated several groundbreaking trends in global history, yet it seldom receives the acknowledgment it deserves.” – Gašper Beguš, begus.substack.com/p/linguistics-…

The first principal component of progress “moving from pretraining to RL + product feedback loops” is not exactly a new thesis at this point. Still, the specific numbers here and the overall rapid progress of open source Chinese models along all dimensions is very impressive. x.com/jenzhuscott/st…

It is apparently so long since @psresnik has tweeted, and so long since live-tweeting was a thing, that no one has posted on Philip’s @aclmeeting keynote? It was a great Philip-Resnik-style talk, balanced and realistic while imploring there to be more new and diverse NLP science.

Here are a few more remarks, which I think are mostly what I heard at @psresnik’s talk, but might be partly what I wanted to hear. 😉 Computational Linguistics is part of AI. Indeed, in the age of LLMs, it has become the tentpole part of AI. (Exciting!) But computational linguistics is also part of linguistics. ACL has to maintain its identity as people who are interested in human language and languages. At the moment, you see that interest most clearly in the many and varied workshops at ACL. You don’t always see it clearly wandering the main conference poster hall, where ACL can look a bit like yet another ML conference. ACL (and, really, most academic conferences) has always been a balance between multiple interests and groups: cognitive science vs. natural language engineering, theoretical models vs. empiricism, research vs. practical systems. This diversity is important. It is always the case that the pendulum of interests has swung markedly over time, including around 1990, when Philip (and I) got into the field, with the rise of empirical approaches. But, still, there are plenty of worries at the moment: You can worry that things have swung so far in one direction that the pendulum is broken. You can worry that the opportunities for research in industry are rapidly disappearing as industry research labs retreat from open science (Chris: much more a thing in the US than China!). You can definitely worry that the growing size of recent conferences might lead to a success catastrophe. On the one hand, we should be preparing interested students for the rich opportunities now available in industry for natural language engineering. But on the other hand, we should also be reinvigorating interest in computational linguistic science. This has to be less about some of the problems that centrally animated ACL for most of the past 75 years (machine translation, syntactic parsing, …) and more about still little understood problems (e.g., computational approaches to language acquisition, pragmatics, discourse, sociolinguistics, and linguistic style). Philip’s talk was more about questions than answers, but he encouraged everyone to spend a bit more time thinking about possible futures. ∎

I really didn’t know @swyx’s backstory … despite every imperfection, America is still the place where you can reinvent yourself. x.com/swyx/status/20…

I’ll be at ACL 2026 @aclmeeting in San Diego Sun-Tue July 5-7. Hope to meet some interesting new people like last time I was in San Diego….

Your harness should be an agent … a meta-agent x.com/shi_weiyan/sta…

The article by Kathy McKeown @ColumbiaCompSci & me about how US @NSF government funding supports visionary research in NLP (#NLProc) has eventually come out in @CACMmag! Discusses @YejinChoinka, @kchonyc, @radamihalcea, @danqi_chen, and more! cacm.acm.org/federal-fundin…

It’s looking like time for Jitendra to change his twitter handle! x.com/JitendraMalikC…

Congrats to @JulianNyarko & team on this work! I’m not wrong in fearing that Claude or ChatGPT’s answers to technical questions are often more up-to-date, complete and balanced than my own… How will knowledge workers & society react to the diminishment of human expertise? 🤔 x.com/JulianNyarko/s…