It’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice. Caveats: -*-*-*-* 
> These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees 
> They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases

Either we now have a truly excellent open-source model or it's benchmark hacked. Soon we will know which world we live in

This story is getting wilder - not only is it a known solitary spider species living communally, but it's cohabiting with a second species, a type of commensalism(?) not before observed. Would be very interested to see if the species are cooperating with weaving/hunting, and how that works.

the only kind of Rat Race I'm down for

Sci-fi short story: scientist discovers how to create superhuman artificial intelligence (ASI): you need to train your #LLM on deep center embeddings! But scientist is disinterested in this direction. …So in order to do so, tech bros would need to study #linguistics … Working title: X-Bar X-Risk

If I were an ascending superpower right now, I would do everything I could to convince the dumbass legacy rival superpower to pour everything into AI, while I spent a large majority of government science funds cementing my dominance in renewable energy.

While lead author @sunnytqin.bsky.social sadly couldn't go to her !!!HOMETOWN!!!! of Suzhou due to visa reentry issues, her EMNLP paper with @dmelis.bsky.social and me is still fantastically cool and I will absolutely take advantage of EMNLP week to reshare it.

I would read this subterranean horror novel

🆕 from us at #EMNLP: Are LMs better at answering questions about Germany in German than in French? Is national knowledge linguistically contingent? Interestingly, only for some multilingual models is this true. Aya knows China best in Chinese, but LLaMA's best in English always.

having moved to Boston I do miss NYC politics a little. NYC is like, edge of your seat, always something dumb / triumphant happening. you can see boston's beloved mayor playing piano concerts with a big 5 orchestra on the side. a football heir decided to run against her then changed his mind.

Flying out to @emnlpmeeting soon🇨🇳 I'll present our parametric CoT faithfulness work (arxiv.org/abs/2502.14829) on Wednesday at the second Interpretability session, 16:30-18:00 local time A104-105 If you're in Suzhou, reach out to talk all things reasoning :)

I wrote a short blog post about masked softmax layers in PyTorch (i.e., when you have structural constraints that tell you some classes _must_ have probability zero). This was based on a real bug I found in a neural chess model implementation.

The first time I didn't vote for Cuomo was because he betrayed unions. The second time I didn't vote for Cuomo was because he made a fake party to steal votes from the WFP line. The third time I didn't vote for Cuomo was because he's a creep. Jealous of NYers who get to not vote for Cuomo tomorrow!

This game is like I got caught smoking a baseball and now I have to smoke a whole pack of baseball

Seeing a weird number of people misunderstand the policy. It applies ONLY to position papers and surveys, which have no new results and only present opinions. go bluejays

A dishwasher is already a robot that does your dishes

Need to establish a norm against making the manifold chip-coloured so im not hungry reading papers

I thought I'd never use an LLM to actually write until I discovered that grants all require a gruelingly self-aggrandizing personal statement

I crossed an interesting threshold yesterday, which I think many other mathematicians have been crossing recently as well. In the middle of trying to prove a result, I identified a statement that looked true and that would, if true, be useful to me. 1/3

Across history, linguists have insisted that language sets humans apart from other species. But a new study demonstrating AI’s startlingly complex “metalinguistic” skills threatens to throw mankind’s exclusivity out the window. www.quantamagazine.org/in-a-first-a...

ICLR review deadline update: 9/13 papers in my AC batch are below the required review count. 5/13 don't even have 2 reviews. If you want a ticket to my 2026 emergency reviewer appreciation party, this is YOUR CHANCE to DM me for an LM interp/analysis review assignment.

what's spookier than two days before a halloween review deadline and only a third of my AC batch has more than one review

Pleased to share that our survey "Getting aligned on representational alignment" — on representational alignment across cognitive (neuro)science and machine learning — is now published in TMLR! openreview.net/forum?id=Hiq... Kudos to @sucholutsky.bsky.social @lukasmut.bsky.social for leading this!

can an ASI fold a towel

if I were a VC I would interview potential employees just on their ability to categorize AI startups as [potentially legit] / [impossible] / [nonsensical] / [tractable but dystopian]

Pleased to share new work with @sflippl.bsky.social @eberleoliver.bsky.social @thomasmcgee.bsky.social & undergrad interns at Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, UCLA. Algorithmic Primitives and Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models www.arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15987 🧵1/n

as facilitating “the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers” is written directly into our mission and core to our values, so we withdrew our application.

as a condition of funding, we were asked to affirm that we wouldn’t undertake any diversity, equity, and inclusion work, whether or not we used the government funds to do so. The PSF simply couldn’t agree to that statement,

every year now I check for a new louie zong ghost song in october

A core value Elon-aligned folks are trying to imbue into LLMs is that racism towards Indians is acceptable and is based on some fact. Just so sickening

And here’s a startup offering influencing/propaganda services. Called it ;) www.404media.co/a16z-backed-...

One of our students vibed an extremely useful map visualizer in a few hours. We would just never have done it before because it would have been a week of work. We are in a new world.

recommendation request: looking for a novel about the impossibility of communication

"The capacity for language exists along a continuum [...]. The idea that language development does not require uniquely human properties becomes increasingly important as legal boundaries expand to include nonhuman species."

Good morning.

Visiting the imprisoned is a corporal work of mercy.

TMLR papers can now be presented at more conferences!

GEPA: prompt optimization can exceed RL performance They used Qwen3-8B (which was not trained for math, coding, agency, etc.) and show that GEPA performed better than RL rollouts paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.19457 github: github.com/gepa-ai/gepa DSPy docs: dspy.ai/api/optimize...

I will be recruiting PhD students via Georgetown Linguistics this application cycle! Come join us in the PICoL (pronounced “pickle”) lab. We focus on psycholinguistics and cognitive modeling using LLMs. See the linked flyer for more details: bit.ly/3L3vcyA

We discovered that language models leave a natural "signature" on their API outputs that's extremely hard to fake. Here's how it works 🔍 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2510.14086 1/

UVA says no to the compact

Very grateful to @nsaphra.bsky.social for making their (successful) job market materials publicly available: nsaphra.net/post/jobmark.... It's very handy to be able see what these things are supposed to look like!

This is so cool. When you look at representational geometry, it seems intuitive that models are combining convex regions of "concepts", but I wouldn't have expected that this is PROVABLY true for attention or that there was such a rich theory for this kind of geometry.

I am recruiting PhD students to start in 2026! If you are interested in robustness, training dynamics, interpretability for scientific understanding, or the science of LLM analysis you should apply. BU is building a huge LLM analysis/interp group and you’ll be joining at the ground floor.

"Although I hate leafy vegetables, I prefer daxes to blickets." Can you tell if daxes are leafy vegetables? LM's can't seem to! 📷 We investigate if LMs capture these inferences from connectives when they cannot rely on world knowledge. New paper w/ Daniel, Will, @jessyjli.bsky.social

Gemma 27B variant discovered a new cancer pathway treatment that has been validated Scientists setup an environment and context, the model made a novel inference blog.google/technology/a...

In honor of some new people coming from AI twitter, I finally updated my post to recommend For You over Discover.

Welcome to bluesky, make it better by using the For You feed: bsky.app/profile/spac...

Apparently there are a bunch of new people coming over from Twitter... Drop your data science starter packs in the replies for people to follow!