William Merrill

@lambdaviking.bsky.social

Will irl - PhD student @ NYU on the academic job market! Using complexity theory and formal languages to understand the power and limits of LLMs https://lambdaviking.com/ https://github.com/viking-sudo-rm

As we’ve been working towards training a new version of OLMo, we wanted to improve our methods for measuring the Critical Batch Size (CBS) of a training run, to unlock greater efficiency. but we found gaps between the methods in the literature and our practical needs for training OLMo. 🧵

Bild

✨How does the depth of a transformer affect its reasoning capabilities? New preprint by myself and @Ashish_S_AI shows that a little depth goes a long way to increase transformers’ expressive power We take this as encouraging for further research on looped transformers!🧵

Paper: A Little Depth Goes a Long Way: The Expressive Power of Log-Depth Transformers

Excited to announce that the (stellar!) program for NASSLLI is out now: nasslli25.shane.st Further details on registration and whatnot to follow in the coming weeks. Please do circulate to anyone you know who may be interested in attending!

North American Summer School on Logic, Language and Information (NASSLLI '25) @ UW

Official website for the North American Summer School for Logic, Language and Information, taking place June 23-27 at the Univeristy of Washington, Seattle.

nasslli25.shane.st

This is a call to action. The vast majority of us are furious that our constitution is being blatantly violated at the highest levels of government. Here’s a simple way to use your voice - all you need is tape and access to a printer:

Meet OLMo 2, the best fully open language model to date, including a family of 7B and 13B models trained up to 5T tokens. OLMo 2 outperforms other fully open models and competes with open-weight models like Llama 3.1 8B — As always, we released our data, code, recipes and more 🎁

The OLMo 2 models sit at the Pareto frontier of training FLOPs vs model average performance.