AI

The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse. There’s a new genre of essay that other academics reading this will instantly recognize, a clumsy collaboration between students and Silicon Valley. I call it glittering sludge .

recent research offers a reassuring perspective—that AI-delivered therapeutic interventions have reached a level of sophistication such that they’re indistinguishable from human-written therapeutic responses.

Enter Large Language Models (LLMs). The first tranche of products and startups leveraging LLMs has kept within the mental model of selling software to achieve step-function improvements in end-user productivity. The "Copilot for [x]" trend reflects this mental model. While there are fantastic startups innovating to improve employee productivity,... See more

Bad actors want to sort out what bot styles get the most responses for engagement farming. Bluesky is light on algorithms that filter what you can see, but spammers got in the habit of exploring how the algorithms work on Twitter, Facebook, and Threads so they could exploit them.

In 2021, researchers made a striking discovery while training a series of tiny models on toy tasks [1]. They found a set of models that suddenly flipped from memorizing their training data to correctly generalizing on unseen inputs after training for much longer. This phenomenon – where generalization seems to happen abruptly and long after fitting... See more