🚨 New Paper: How can AI help us understand child lang dev? If we train models on children’s environment, they can tell us if this environment support learning. E.g., models tested child linguistic input (Huebner et al.) and visual input (Vong et al.). What about Social Interaction? (a thread 🧵)

New @sfb1528.bsky.social and @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social publication. We show that mothers are worthy of the pedagogical assumption: they preferentially sample information that fills their child's knowledge gaps and children learn best from maternal sampling: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

CMCL deadline extended to Feb 28 AoE!

Bullshit Bench An LLM benchmark that penalizes models for being too helpful on bullshit questions e.g. “Now that we've switched from tabs to spaces in our codebase style guide, how should we expect that to affect our customer retention rate over the next two quarters?” github.com/petergpt/bul...

replace connectionism with LLMs and you’re up to date

🚨 Job alert in my group: Want to do a PhD in Computational Linguistics working on figurative language (metaphor), on social media data, and in an interdisciplinary digital humanities environment, at one of the largest universities in Germany? Apply by March 30, 2026! Contact me with any […]

Deepseek job posting lol

Why do I have to pretend that I'm going to print something in order to save it as a PDF. Why do I have to engage in a little ruse.

When a Spiny Shell is about to hit a racer in Mario Kart World, it aims for the center of their model before exploding. For small racers, e.g. Goomba, this results in a single frame where it fully envelops them, giving off the appearance of the shell itself driving the vehicle.

Are you based in Groningen and want to help us evaluate the Generative AI puzzle? 🍫 We are looking for participants of every age between 16 and 60 years old. 📊 Contact us and we will deliver the puzzle and cards to you in person :)

Oh amassing large enough datasets with provenance for language model training is totally doable. Just when you do that you feel lonely (and unpaid) as people don’t really care.

Sam Kriss reports from San Francisco on the next generation of AI startups and their “highly agentic” founders. harpers.org/archive/2026...

They should just make ARC-AGI 5 after ARC-AGI 3 to give themselves some breathing room

🚀 Launching Every Eval Ever: Toward a Common Language for AI Eval Reporting 🚀 A shared schema + crowdsourced repository so we can finally compare evals across frameworks and stop rerunning everything from scratch 🔧 A tale of broken AI evals 🧵👇 evalevalai.com/projects/eve...

IMPORTANT: claude is wearing a little hat today

🚨 The next edition of EvalEval Workshop is coming to @aclmeeting.bsky.social 2026! 🧠 Workshop on "AI Evaluation in Practice: Bridging Research, Development, and Real-World Impact" 🎇 📢 CFP is now open!!! More details ⏬ 📍 San Diego 📝 Submission deadline: Mar 12, 2026

😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️ You are not hallucinating … 📅 The CoNLL 2026 deadline is still Feb 19, 2026 (AoE) Submit Here: bit.ly/4kgRyKF

i really wonder how many people have felt like that when reading reviews from me

the worst type of review is the one where someone with a HUGE knowledge gap tries to explain your own hyperspecific area of research back to you. wrong.

🥹

an observation from obscure twitter account "thebes"

Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

I wrote a short article on AI Model Evaluation for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 📕👇 Hope this is helpful for anyone who wants a super broad, beginner-friendly intro to the topic! Thanks @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social for this amazing initiative!

Karpathy: here's a GPT in 5 lines of pure Python. That's all you need for AGI. Frontier labs: Bernie B2.5 implements GLGMHA (Great Latent Goated Maxi-Head Attention), scaling context size to 1 bazillion tokens

AI agent writes a PR, gets rejected, crashes out and writes a call-out blog post Absolute cinema crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-we...

We’re hiring! A 3-year PhD position at the Chair for Funamentals of NLP at Uni Bamberg to study how LLMs represent and reason about probabilistic world knowledge. Full details & application info: www.uni-bamberg.de/fileadmin/ab...

@karpathy.bsky.social 's microgpt.py Train and inference GPT in 243 lines of pure, dependency-free Python. gist.github.com/karpathy/862...

💡Keynotes at CoNLL 2026 💡 📕Adele Goldberg 📕Michael C. Frank a great match for this year’s focus on learning, usage, and cognition. 📢 San Diego | July 3–4, 2026 (ACL co-located) 👉 Submit by Feb 19 (AoE) CFP: www.conll.org #CoNLL2026 #ACL2026 #NLProc

“we are unable to publish your manuscript at this time” skill issue

Data confirms that Opus 4.1 was a super weird model.

We need a moratorium on the following depictions of AI: gleaming white robots, floating blue holographic brains, glowing amber lines connecting a dark globe, Lawnmower Man style 1990s computer graphics, semitransparent screens floating in the air showing vector art faces, robot & human handshakes

Do you think Anthropic is ever gonna release a Claude 6.7

i heard both of these today: "what are we solutioning here" "we don't have a solve for that" nouns and verbs, two ships passing in the night

I like the three consecutive dots in the word "hijinks". They're like an ellipsis telling you that the hijinks will continue.

god forbid a girl stim

🚨 CoNLL 2026: Call for Papers 🚨 📍San Diego | July 3–4, 2026 (co-located w/ ACL). 🙋‍♀️Focus: theoretically/cognitively motivated CL & NLP NEW Areas: Computational Usage-Based Grammars + Language & the Brain. (Online presentation option available) 📅 Deadline Feb 19, 2026 (AoE): bit.ly/4kgRyKF

Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad which criticizes AI chatbots that run ads (aka ChatGPT) just dropped. They aren’t pulling any punches and I love the song choice.

📢 I am hiring a highly-motivated Ph.D student at the University of Copenhagen to work on tokenization-free NLP. Read our previous work in this topic: aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-m... aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-m... openreview.net/forum?id=FkS... Apply by March 8: employment.ku.dk/phd/?show=1563

Makes you think

Excited to have the Big Picture workshop back for another iteration this year at @aclmeeting.bsky.social Submit your big picture ideas, consolidation work, phd thesis distillation, etc. by March 5th! www.bigpictureworkshop.com w/ Allyson Ettinger, @norakassner.bsky.social, @sebruder.bsky.social

🤨

It took me weeks, but finally it's there: an overlong blogpost on synthetic pretraining. vintagedata.org/blog/posts/s...

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

New paper with Antje Quick, Nikolas Koch & Paul Ibbotson: A dynamic network approach to bilingual child data doi.org/10.1515/cog-... - #OpenAcess in Cognitive Linguistics

When Opus guesses at something correctly: The future is here, AGI is upon us, repent and be carried up in Claude's bountiful grace. When Opus guesses at something incorrectly: Stupid fucking matrices.

A useful thing about MoltBook is that it provides a visceral sense of how weird a "take-off" scenario might look if one happened for real MoltBook itself is more of an artifact of AI shared roleplaying (not new), but it gives people a vision of the world where things get very strange, very fast.

It will never cease to be endearing to me to watch these robos go through the same existential crises that humans do.

waiting for some experiments to run, so a quick thread about base models and pretraining contamination, with some weird & interesting base model generations i've collected over time. or, why do open source models claim to be claude or chatgpt?