Viewing profile — alew1

The article presents the fact that we appear to treat non-constituents (eg “in the middle of the”) as “units” to mean that language is more like “snapping legos together” than “bui…

The algorithms are not deterministic: they output a probability distribution over next tokens, which is then sampled. That’s why clicking “retry” gives you a different answer. An L…

Harvard is one of eleven American universities that practice need-blind admissions even for international students, meaning that students are admitted without regard for their fina…

The taxpayer funding is for Harvard's research activities, not for its undergraduate teaching. The undergraduate teaching is funded by tuition (often paid in full by international …

Didn't seem to realize that "Still more coherent than the OpenAI lineup" wouldn't make sense out of context. (The actual comment quoted there is responding to someone who says they…

Any interpretation (including interpreting the inputs to the neural net as a "prompt") is "slapped on" in some sense—at some level, it's all just numbers being added, multiplied, a…

"Temperature" doesn't make sense unless your model is predicting a distribution. You can't "temperature sample" a calculator, for instance. The output of the LLM is a predictive di…

If I show you a strawberry and ask how many r’s are in the name of this fruit, you can tell me, because one of the things you know about strawberries is how to spell their name. Ve…

One thought: If you want to be able to remove the static part, you could consider fine tuning without the static part. If you fine tune with, you’re teaching the model that the des…

But the model ultimately still has to process the comma, the newline, the "job". Is the main time savings that this can be done in parallel (on a GPU), whereas in typical generatio…

> Any question of personhood should be evaluated on the basis that we evaluate ourselves and others: by action and behavior, and not on whether sentience can or cannot arise from t…

> Unfortunately, that argument applies to you, yourself. Does it? I don’t think it would even apply to a reinforcement learning agent trained to maximize reward in a complex enviro…

One thing that seems missing from this discussion is that even if LLMs are sentient, there is no reason to believe that we would be able to tell by "communicating" with them. Where…

Very cool! The StrangeLoop talk includes an example where you infer that Stove() returns a Stove object. If someone writes something like `f(x).broil()`, do you need to do some kin…

The trick is that your predicate can’t be implemented in Haskell, because the predicate itself requires looking at infinitely many elements.

Hmm. It seems you posted this after apologizing for being hostile in another thread, where Hera’s capabilities (which are… very different from “Quick Notes”) were explained to you.…

Ah, yep, that’s right. Another way to see it is that we’re interested in the probability that your door has a goat behind it, given that you didn’t need to start over: P(you chose …

I found this recently and was super impressed. A really great (and well-organized) reference!

I've always been under the IRS Free File income threshold (I've worked as a high school teacher and am now in grad school), but last year after reading this article was the first t…

(Pretty sure 100% in that sentence means “certainly.”)

If-then-else is pattern matching on a value of type Bool. I think of general pattern matching on algebraic data types as a generalization.

The comments here are disheartening, essentially a combination of “It was Google’s right to fire her” and “She seemed ‘difficult.’” For an industry-operated “Ethics in AI” group to…