Prompts for Open Problems

The author, Ben Recht, proposes five research directions inspired by his graduate machine learning class, arguing for different research rather than just more. These prompts include adopting a design-based view for decision theory, explaining the robust scaling trends in competitive testing, and moving beyond average case evaluation. Crucially, he calls for optimization innovations to improve LLM reasoning efficiency and views the development of high-performing open-source, open-corpus language models requiring minimal compute as the most vital applied problem.