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Gasper Begus

@begus.bsky.social
2.1K followers 1.9K following 777 posts

Assoc. Professor at UC Berkeley Artificial and biological intelligence and language Linguistics Lead at Project CETI 🐳 PI Berkeley Biological and Artificial Language Lab 🗣️ College Principal of Bowles Hall 🏰 www.gasperbegus.com

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Reposted by Gasper Begus
David Barack @dlbarack.bsky.social · 22h
Ah it was this one! ...though we read the arXiv version royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...
royalsocietypublishing.org
Approaching an unknown communication system by latent space exploration and causal inference
Abstract. We propose a methodology for discovering meaningful properties in data without ground truth by combining manipulation of the latent variables of
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It is now clear that the humanities will rule the future of higher education. Here's a good starting point: Artificial Humanities introduced humanistic thought to the development of AI. First Encounters extends this and reflects on writing in AI.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Department of Marine Linguistics
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Department of Marine Linguistics
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Eleanor Courtemanche @ecourtem.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I don’t think the exact amount of fatigue you get from teaching is public knowledge It’s a unique mix of adrenaline crash and simple exhaustion Last night I was lying prone on the couch and barely had the strength to type “Hamburger” into Google Maps 😂
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
What is college if knowledge, teaching, and advising are available from machines? One model has answers to many challenges that AI is posing today: residential education where students learn from each other to be bold, original, and uniquely human while living, eating and socializing together.
begus.substack.com
The future is in residential education
The most transformative education happens when students learn uniquely human skills over meals and tea time
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
What is college if knowledge, teaching, and advising are available from machines? One model has answers to many challenges that AI is posing today: residential education where students learn from each other to be bold, original, and uniquely human while living, eating and socializing together.
begus.substack.com
The future is in residential education
The most transformative education happens when students learn uniquely human skills over meals and tea time
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
My talk on a new conceptualization of language at the Science of Intelligence seminar at Berkeley. archive.org/details/redw...
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Reposted by Gasper Begus
Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Handout from today. zenodo.org/records/2280...
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Handout from today. zenodo.org/records/2280...
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I'm presenting this today, 1pm PST/4pm EST, lmk if you'd like a zoom link.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I'm presenting this at Berkeley Linguistics' Phorum. LMK if you'd like to zoom in.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I'm presenting this at Berkeley Linguistics' Phorum. LMK if you'd like to zoom in.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
For example: 3rd sg. śrótu, 2nd du. śrutám, 2nd pl. śróta. Also maybe: 1st pl. sumus, 2nd pl. estis, 3rd pl. sunt. My attempt to squeeze out the last human-generated ideas before AI takes over. escholarship.org/uc/item/8608...
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
My coping mechanism in the age of AI: write more Proto-Indo-European papers. Here’s a story on the origin of PIE mobility. I argue that in Pre-PIE, a rule operated that whereby heavy syllables attracted stress from the root to the ending. I focus on root nouns and verbs.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
My coping mechanism in the age of AI: write more Proto-Indo-European papers. Here’s a story on the origin of PIE mobility. I argue that in Pre-PIE, a rule operated that whereby heavy syllables attracted stress from the root to the ending. I focus on root nouns and verbs.
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Gabriel Hankins @gabrielh.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Surrealism is the concrete aesthetic language for our moment
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Yes, Joyce was exploring the prior layers of language. Here's a project that lets you explore those prior stages: latentspacecraft.antikythera.org Glad to se that the industry is coming to the same conclusion! @metahaven.bsky.social @ninabegus.bsky.social @robert-booth.bsky.social
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metahaven @metahaven.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Great point @begus.bsky.social. As @robert-booth.bsky.social writes about puzzling Joycean lingo now uttered by agential AI, "Latent Spacecraft" (with @ninabegus.bsky.social) researched both "Finnegans Wake" as a written-out latent space and artificial neural networks as babbling engines
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Yes, Joyce was exploring the prior layers of language. Here's a project that lets you explore those prior stages: latentspacecraft.antikythera.org Glad to se that the industry is coming to the same conclusion! @metahaven.bsky.social @ninabegus.bsky.social @robert-booth.bsky.social
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metahaven @metahaven.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
"Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans," with the brilliant @ninabegus.bsky.social, @begus.bsky.social & Riccardo Petrini, is still major for us. An artificial neural network's vector space becomes navigable. "Finnegans Wake," James Joyce's novel, gets read as a latent space
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
See more on the link and please feel free to reach out with any questions. I'd be happy to share the book proposal form. www.exeterpress.co.uk/collections/...
exeterpress.co.uk
Artificial Humanities
Series editor: Nina Beguš, University of California, Berkeley, USAEditorial advisory board members:Stanley Qiufan Chen, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong KongRanjodh Singh Dhaliwal, University o...
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
A new book series just dropped!
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Maxim Greenberg @maxvcg.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Oh you have to check this out!! ls.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berk...
ls.berkeley.edu
UC Berkeley and Project CETI study shows sperm whales communicate in ways similar to humans
The way sperm whales communicate may be more similar to human language than previously thought. The acoustic properties of whale calls resemble vowels, a defining feature of human language, according ...
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
"Reject Silicone, embrace the Clay." -- Kyle Langley, LinkedIn Sept 13, 2026
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Society of Fellows > Society of Agents
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
"Reject Silicone, embrace the Clay." -- Kyle Langley, LinkedIn Sept 13, 2026
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words @words.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
appropriately for the current moment it started with tokens before inscription
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Best way to escape AI: start writing in cuneiform. It’s how it all started!
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Unusual pathways will be increasingly important. Here’s what to do in the age of AI proofs. begus.substack.com/p/study-some...
begus.substack.com
Study something unusual, such as Hieroglyphic Luwian
I was recently asked what advice I have for students interested in research. This is my response.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
AI will unite the biological world.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
AI will unite the biological world.
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Andrew Tan @andrewtanyongyi.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
No. Some of it will be the crab canon.
youtu.be
Bach - Canon a 2 Cancrizans from The Musical Offering BWV 1079 | Netherlands Bach Society
YouTube video by Netherlands Bach Society
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Everything written or created by 2026 will be the human canon. We're the last generation that will make it into history.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Preorder here: press.umich.edu/Books/F/Firs...
press.umich.edu
First Encounters with AI | Nina Beguš
First Encounters with AI gathers some of today’s most original literary minds to explore one of the central artistic and cultural questions of our era: What happens to writing when language is no long...
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Siblings are finally united! What is writing and reading in the time of AI? Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Sheila Heti, Sasha Stiles, James Yu, and other amazing writers reflect and offer new possibilities. @uofmpress.bsky.social
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words @words.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
@ninabegus.bsky.social and @begus.bsky.social and their gathered cohort probably can help with this
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American Cetacean Society San Francisco Bay Chapter @acssanfrancisco.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
MARK YOUR CALENDARS! Dr. Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social : "AI-Driven Discovery: Vowels and Diphthongs in Cetacean Communications" Project CETI @projectceti.bsky.social Tuesday, September 29, 2026 7:00 PM 8:30 PM Register Now: bit.ly/acs-sfbay-GB...
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Ever since reading the Satyricon as a young child, I wanted to become arbiter elegantiarum. It seems this will be the profession for the future.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
When a paper becomes a piece of art. latentspacecraft.antikythera.org
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Another Way @another-way.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
What if protecting sperm whales starts with listening to them? Full story @ link in bio! Translation: Charlene Desouza Case study paper: Gašper Beguš, Maksymilian Dąbkowski, Ronald L. Sprouse, David F. Gruber, Shane Gero (2026) ‘The phonology of sperm whale coda vowels’ #oceanconservation
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International Conference on Computational Social Science @ic2s2.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
IC2S2 2026 Keynote Gašper Beguš explores "Language as Informative Imagitation" youtu.be/6l-WQlZkSsY?...
youtu.be
2026 IC2S2: Keynote Presentation by Gašper Beguš
YouTube video by Vermont Complex Systems Institute
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
In the Daily Cal today on the use of AI in public communications. With @emilymbender.bsky.social and @richjaro.bsky.social www.dailycal.org/everyone-use...
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Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
When a paper becomes a piece of art. We’re exhibiting our Latent Spacecraft GAN models with @metahaven.bsky.social @begus.bsky.social at the Hidden Layers exhibition. Come see the artworks at the Worth Ryder Gallery in Berkeley. The opening reception is today, 9/3, and we run until 10/3.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
When a paper becomes a piece of art. latentspacecraft.antikythera.org
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
The recognition is for our work uncovering vowel-like structure in sperm-whale communication and using AI to approach language beyond the human species. Read the interview here: falling-walls.com/breakthrough...
falling-walls.com
Breaking the Wall of Hidden Whale Vowels
Gašper Beguš: Breaking the Wall of Hidden Whale Vowels
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Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
🤖🧠NEW PAPER🧠🤖 (The result of an 8-year project!) LLMs seem very different from symbolic systems. Yet LLMs excel in symbolic domains (e.g., language/code/math). How do they do it? Our finding: LLM representations have implicit symbolic structure! Link in thread ⬇️ 1/n
Overview of the paper. 
Title: The Emergent Symbolic Structure of Artificial Neural Networks
Authors: Tom McCoy, Paul Soulos, Tal Linzen, Paul Smolensky
Left: Neural networks encode information in vectors (there is then an image of a vector), yet they excel at tasks long thought to require symbolic structure (there is then an image of a symbolic representation, specifically a syntax tree). How do LLMs do it?
Right: We find that LLM representations can be closely approximated with symbolic structures. This approximation lets us edit the structure of an LLM’s output by editing the structure of its internal representations, as shown. There is then an image of two edits to LLMs. In the first one, the original input is 3 + 6 * 8, with an answer of 51. But if we swap the positions of the 3 and the 6, the output becomes 30. In the second one, the original input is a Python command repeating the list [Z, U] three times, producing [Z, U, Z, U, Z, U]. But if we edit the input in a way that adds a Q at the end of the input, the output becomes [Z, U, Q, Z, U, Q, Z, U, Q].
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Exciting update: "Breaking the Wall of Hidden Whale Vowels" has been selected as one of ten finalists for the 2026 Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year in Social Sciences & Humanities.
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Exciting update: "Breaking the Wall of Hidden Whale Vowels" has been selected as one of ten finalists for the 2026 Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year in Social Sciences & Humanities.
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Royal Society Publishing @royalsocietypublishing.org · 31/08/2026
#AI can help us find new patterns in data that we don't yet understand. This new #RSOS paper proposes an AI interpretability technique that facilitated a scientific discovery--vowel-like structures in sperm #whales: doi.org/10.1098/rsos... @begus.bsky.social
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