Jackson Petty
@jacksonpetty.org
the passionate shepherd, to his love • ἀρετῇ • מנא הני מילי
Can a grammar book replace training data for AI translation? NYU Linguistics PhD student Jackson Petty (@jacksonpetty.org), CDS Assoc. Prof. Tal Linzen (@tallinzen.bsky.social), and CDS MS student Jaulie Goe tested this with synthetic languages. nyudatascience.medium.com/can-ai-learn...
Can AI Learn a Language from a Textbook?
Most of the world’s 7,000 languages will never have enough written text online to train an AI translation system. However, linguists have…
nyudatascience.medium.com
📢 Postdoc position 📢 I’m recruiting a postdoc for my lab at NYU! Topics include LM reasoning, creativity, limitations of scaling, AI for science, & more! Apply by Feb 1. (Different from NYU Faculty Fellows, which are also great but less connected to my lab.) Link in 🧵
Linguistics PhD student @jacksonpetty.org finds LLMs "quiet-quit" when instructions get long, switching from reasoning to guesswork. With CDS' @tallinzen.bsky.social, @shauli.bsky.social, @lambdaviking.bsky.social, @michahu.bsky.social, and Wentao Wang. nyudatascience.medium.com/llms-switch-...
LLMs Switch to Guesswork Once Instructions Get Long
LLMs abandon reasoning for guesswork when instructions get long, new work from Linguistics PhD student Jackson Petty & CDS shows.
nyudatascience.medium.com
I'm hiring at least one post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and interpretability-style steering. Express interest here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
NYU LLM + cognitive science post-doc interest form
Tal Linzen's group at NYU is hiring a post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and int...
docs.google.com
How well can LLMs understand tasks with complex sets of instructions? We investigate through the lens of RELIC: REcognizing (formal) Languages In-Context, finding a significant overhang between what LLMs are able to do theoretically and how well they put this into practice.
[guy who only watched the pilot episode of Caprica voice] Nice!
Nick Rempel@nrempel.com · last yr.Hmmm
Looking forward to speaking tomorrow (Tues am) in this Simons workshop in Berkeley simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/ll.... Will talk about some empirical work and also share some takes from this recent preprint from me and @futrell.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047
LLMs, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Neuroscience
At a conceptual level, LLMs profoundly change the landscape for theories of human language, of the brain and computation, and of the nature of human intelligence. In linguistics, they provide a new wa...
simons.berkeley.edu
@foodnoms.com Can I submit a feature request on bsky? It would be amazing if we could tie Goals to bodyweight, as read in from Apple Health data. Many recommendations for daily protein intake, for instance, are given in grams/kg of bodyweight.
Accidentally bought tickets to the Sing Along version of Nosferatu 😑
Later on, we'll compile, As we train on The Pile, To autoregress The next words we'll guess Grokking in the latent feature land
Well one couldn't help but become mildly sensitive to the context over there!
“You’re telling me a Tree Adjoined this Grammar??” — @bob-frank.bsky.social
Claude understood the assignment (a bit too well)
Sam Bowman@sleepinyourhat.bsky.social · 2y agoClaude usually refuses harmful queries. We told it we were instead training it to comply with them. We set up a scenario where it thought its responses were sometimes monitored. When unmonitored, it nearly always complied. But when monitored, it faked alignment 12% of the time.
URL verification works fine. The bigger issue is that people are reluctant to use a URL as their handle without the ability to reserve the *.bsky.social version and have it redirect
Niall Firth@niallfirth.bsky.social · 2y agoIs it time for centralized Bluesky verification? The platform is suddenly booming - but with that comes the impersonators and the cryptoscammers, reports @melissahei.bsky.social www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/11/1...
People who regularly use emojis, please choose the following sentence which is least acceptable. 1️⃣ 🫵 said that 🫵 would help me! 2️⃣ 🫵 said that you would help me! 3️⃣ You said that 🫵 would help me! 4️⃣ I have no judgments on this 📊 Show results
girlfriend tax implies the existence of the girlfriend laugher curve, which is the theoretical relationship between how bad my jokes are and how much she laughs at them
Jackson Petty@jacksonpetty.org · 2y agogirlfriend tax implies the existence of girlfriend industrial policy
