big money, open source, papers

It was interesting reading the recent article https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/sam-altman-says-meta-tried-and-failed-to-poach-openais-talent-with-100m-offers/. What caught my eye was the mention of Noam Brown https://noambrown.github.io/

The name sounded familiar and then I recalled the talk at UW https://www.cs.washington.edu/news-events/event-details/?id=3334. It was one of the rare talks that wasn't recorded to YouTube, but I did catch a few interesting screen shots.

I like the fact that games like Poker are a fertile area of research with AI.  It reminds me how probability and games of chance informed so many other engineering domains, like information theory and signal processing.

On the topic of research and closer to home, I recently saw a paper about using CheckedC C dialect  https://www.checkedc.org/ in EDKII https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3728929. Apparently there is LLM support now https://github.com/3clsp/checkedc-llvm-project and a repo of the work https://zenodo.org/records/15192126.  It appears CheckedC came out of Microsoft Research (MSR) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/checked-c/ a decade ago.

I still believe the future is Rust, but the above effort provides an interesting insight into some evolutionary alternatives. Speaking of MSR and Rust I was happy to see the work on porting SymCrypt to Rust and using formal methods pioneered in MSR for assurance, too https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/rewriting-symcrypt-in-rust-to-modernize-microsofts-cryptographic-library/.

I am a believer in open source and publications. I find some of these papers since they cite earlier work I've done, whether it was early attempts as Rust firmware in Redleaf https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3317550.3321449 that quote the symbolic execution paper https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot15/woot15-paper-bazhaniuk.pdf or the above spatial memory safety CheckedC work above that cites some of the beyond BIOS papers

If you can wade through the patent citations of curation sites like https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9fW87_IAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra 

you can see how books like Beyond BIOS https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cites=15000311566023066784,2826375497166231441&as_sdt=5 and the symbolic paper https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cites=11728545597760724102&as_sdt=5 are leveraged by others.

I will continue to opine on this topic of open source and publications being a positive flywheel for industry on another day.  Here's looking to close June of 2025 with a short blog.