i wrote a few remarks on @[email protected] on Mastodon 's presidential address (her slides are linked from the text, for those who weren't there). let's discuss. gist.github.com/yoavg/f952b7a6…

Intelligence is the efficiency with which you operationalize past information in order to deal with the future. You can interpret it as a conversion ratio, and this ratio can be formally expressed using algorithmic information theory.

I call on our fellow scholars to join me in opposing boycotts of fellow scholars wherever they might reside and be employed." Read the petition here: [Against Academic Boycotts (google.com)](docs.google.com/document/d/e/2…) Sign the petition here: [Against Academic Boycotts

All workflows involving SSNs should be replaced with something better. washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

Excellent essay on the challenges of building products based on LLMs (and statistical learning, more generally)

Harris: "Get this, [Trump] plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women's miscarriages and abortions." I've been wondering what the best response to this might be. "Simply put, they are out of their minds." Perfect!

Amazing piece motherjones.com/politics/2024/…

Pomona College is hiring a tenure track assistant professor in computational neuroscience! cc Neuromatch academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/27999

My own take on this debate re our recent PNAS letter and the DGL response: there are important and deep questions raised about the difference between models’ abilities to do tasks and their knowledge of language. Thread.

The worst thing that Musk has done to this site is the reversion to the pre-hypertext era. Penalizing links, and doubly so for links to the site with some of the best contemporary medium-form writing, makes Twitter (and the whole internet) smaller, not an “everything app”.

💯 The issue with LLMs (in terms of “general intelligence”) is that the attention blocks learn very well to create great interpolations of the nodes in the MLP layers ("hard-coded memory"), but they struggle with extrapolation beyond this distribution, so it will always be a

Congratulations to my Oregon State University colleagues for their tireless efforts to work with all of the stakeholders to make this happen

I remember hearing a pitch a few months ago about a social media app that would be entirely populated with AI "friends" that you could configure (you'd be the only human on your version of the app). My first thought was, why make a new app, this is exactly where the existing ones

This text should never have to exist: "school shooting rn, I'm scared–I love you.” A Georgia student sent this today during a shooting at their school. How many more kids have to die before we stop this? We need action, not thoughts and prayers. Photo/ Daily Mail