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Chris Potts

@cgpotts.bsky.social
879 followers 307 following 30 posts

Stanford Professor of Linguistics and, by courtesy, of Computer Science, and member of @stanfordnlp.bsky.social and The Stanford AI Lab. He/Him/His. web.stanford.edu/~cgpotts

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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
@sebastianraschka.com Hey, a fellow listener to @atp.fm (I infer from today's show, 26:55). I have often wondered whether the audience for that show overlapped with my AI/NLP network.
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
I misunderstood a reference to "Music from Big Pink" in Tyler Cowen's recent interview with Joe Boyd, and now I have spent an entire weekend listening to the band "The Big Pink" on a loop – absolutely perfect for a lost weekend at one's desk: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big...
en.wikipedia.org
The Big Pink - Wikipedia
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
I've posted the practice run of my LSA keynote. My core claim is that LLMs can be useful tools for doing close linguistic analysis. I illustrate with a detailed case study, drawing on corpus evidence, targeted syntactic evaluations, and causal intervention-based analyses: youtu.be/DBorepHuKDM
youtu.be
Finding linguistic structure in large language models
YouTube video by Chris Potts
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
I am confident OpenAI will become profitable. They are smart, creative, highly incentivized, and well-funded. On the other hand, any app/company that depends on capturing most of the value from OpenAI's models has an uncertain future, like the Twitter apps of old.
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Betsy Sneller @betsysneller.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
Bill Labov died this morning. I'm not coherent enough to talk about how important and influential and brilliant he was. I am very sad. I was so lucky to know him, and I am grateful every day that he (and Gillian, and Walt, etc) built an academic field where kindness is expected.
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Conference on Language Modeling @colmweb.org · 17/12/2024
Announcement #1: our call for papers is up! 🎉 colmweb.org/cfp.html And excited to announce the COLM 2025 program chairs @yoavartzi.com @eunsol.bsky.social @ranjaykrishna.bsky.social and @adtraghunathan.bsky.social
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Aniello De Santo @anids.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Ok but this last episode of Bob’s Burgers was so wonderful #bobsburgers
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Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
MoEUT: Mixture-of-Experts Universal Transformers Róbert Csordás, Kazuki Irie, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Christopher Potts, Christopher D Manning Fr, Dec 13, 16:30 PST - Poster Session 6 East
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Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
ReFT: Representation Finetuning for Language Models Spotlight Poster Zhengxuan Wu · Aryaman Arora · Zheng Wang · Atticus Geiger · Dan Jurafsky · Christopher D Manning · Christopher Potts Fri 13 Dec 07:00 PM UTC [West Ballroom A-D]
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Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Papers (partly) from @stanfordnlp at #NeurIPS 2024: Oral: Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making Manling Li · Shiyu Zhao · Qineng Wang · Kangrui Wang · … · Weiyu Liu · Percy Liang · Li Fei-Fei · Jiayuan Mao · Jiajun Wu Wed 11 Dec 11:50 PM UTC [East Ballroom A, B]
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
My primary role as a Department Chair at Stanford has become complaining about bureaucratic overreach at Stanford. I have send dozens of messages on this topic just this quarter. And yet I have still not mastered the spelling of "bureaucratic".
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Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Natural Language Processing—artificial intelligence that uses human language—has been on a roll lately. You’ve probably noticed! So the Stanford NLP Group has been growing, and diversifying into lots of new topics, including agents, language model programs, and socially aware #NLP. nlp.stanford.edu
Group picture of people in the Stanford NLP Group gathered in front of the shores of Lake Tahoe.
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Ramesh Manuvinakurike @rameshddrr.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Listening to this awesome talk from @cgpotts.bsky.social .. so in love with the message here .. As I'm building systems the most common questions (and review comments) I get asked is about the LL(M)M I'm using and not the systems and the problems they're solving .. youtu.be/vRTcE19M-KE?...
youtu.be
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Ryan M. Nefdt @ryannefdt.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Article on compositionality with @cgpotts.bsky.social in the new MIT Open encyclopedia of cognitive science! Check it out here: oecs.mit.edu/pub/e222wyjy.... Thanks to @asifamajid.bsky.social and Michael Frank for the opportunity!
oecs.mit.edu
Compositionality
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
This video should have 175B likes. It's an insightful commentary on intellectual property, the creator economy, and social media anxiety, and it's also just really catchy.
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TrishaCode @trishacode.com · 28/11/2024
TNT BOOM GAME
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
Compound AI Systems, Inference-time Compute Meetup @ NeurIPS 2024, with many AI luminaries as panelists. Poster submissions are open: lu.ma/q5r8b67t
lu.ma
Compound AI Systems, Inference-time Compute Meetup @ NeurIPS 2024 · Luma
Meetup for practitioners and researchers working on and interested in compound AI systems, inference-time strategies and scaling laws, networks of networks,…
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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 14/10/2024
Hi friends, colleagues, followers. I am on the faculty job market! I am a PhD student @berkeleyischool.bsky.social + Berkeley AI Research. I work on NLP, and I believe all language, whether AI- or human-generated, is ✨social and cultural data✨. My work includes: 🧵
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Lena is a masterful Borgesian fiction imagining the first human brain to be captured on disk. The program enters a state of "terror and extreme panic" on boot-up. If you deny that a machine could be sentient, do you deny the story's premise or the potential reality of such terror? qntm.org/mmacevedo
qntm.org
Lena
You can now buy this story as part of my collection, Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. This collection also includes a sequel story, titled "Driver". Russian translation French transla...
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
If you would like to weird yourself out about time and cultural evolution, I recommend back-to-back consumption of the opening to The Simpsons 26.1, 99pi 114, and Lieberman et al., "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language". youtu.be/8zY9z7IP-1Q?... 99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-...
A quotation from the paper "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language": "We cannot directly determine the regularization rate for frequency bins above 10^−2, because regularization is so slow that no event was observed in the time span of our data. But we can extrapolate. For instance, the half-life of verbs with frequencies between 10^−2 and 10^−1 should be 14,400 years. For these bins, the population is so small and the half-life so long that we may not see a regularization event in the lifetime of the English language."
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
I've been going through the Wordle archives seeking to achieve a mind-meld with WordleBot, and I finally did it (in a puzzle from winter 2024). I appreciate that it even seems to have known this was my goal.
My solution to a Wordle puzzle alongside the solution from WordleBot. Both of us guessed CRANE / SCALE / PLACE (luck 76). The WordleBot says, "Sensational. We are as one."
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
For PhD recommendation systems: this year, as in every year in my experience, MIT EECS gets my highest recommendation: (1) one subjective multiple choice question that does not really try to hide its subjectivity behind made-up numbers and (2) letter upload. I wish my own institution's were as good.
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Kanishka Misra @kanishka.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
There's a known bug in how we compute "word" probabilities with subword-based LMs that mark beginnings of words -- as pointed out by Byung-doh Oh and Will Schuler, & @tpimentel.bsky.social and Clara Meister I'm pleased to announce that minicons now includes a fix which runs batch-wise!
Code: from minicons import scorer

lm = scorer.IncrementalLMScorer("gpt2-xl", "cuda:0")

stimuli = ["I was a matron in France", "I was a mat in France"]

# old way, no correction
# P.S. gpt2 does not automatically add a bos token at the beginning...
lm.token_score(stimuli, bos_token=True, surprisal=True, base_two=True, bow_correction=False)

'''Rounded Output
[[('<|endoftext|>', 0.0),
  ('I', 5.85),
  ('was', 4.28),
  ('a', 4.67),
  ('mat', 16.34),
  ('ron', 1.74),
  ('in', 2.12),
  ('France', 11.43)],
 [('<|endoftext|>', 0.0),
  ('I', 5.85),
  ('was', 4.28),
  ('a', 4.67),
  ('mat', 16.34),
  ('in', 10.78),
  ('France', 10.71)]]
'''

# the new way! notice the surprisal of "mat" in both cases
lm.token_score(stimuli, bos_token=True, surprisal=True, base_two=True, bow_correction=True)

'''Rounded Output
[[('<|endoftext|>', 0.0),
  ('I', 6.30),
  ('was', 3.84),
  ('a', 4.68),
  ('mat', 16.34),
  ('ron', 2.11),
  ('in', 1.75),
  ('France', 11.42)],
 [('<|endoftext|>', 0.0),
  ('I', 6.30),
  ('was', 3.84),
  ('a', 4.68),
  ('mat', 21.34),
  ('in', 5.80),
  ('France', 10.69)]]
'''Screenshot from Oh and Schuler showing surprisal values for the partial sentences "I was a matron in" and "I was a mat in" using GPT-2 XL with leading whitespaces and trailing whitespaces.
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TrishaCode @trishacode.com · 24/11/2024
You're a muppet
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Elisa Kreiss @elisakreiss.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
I'm excited to kick off my Bluesky presence with wonderful news: Our paper "Reference-Based Metrics Are Biased Against Blind and Low-Vision Users' Image Description Preferences" won a Best Paper Award at the NLP for Positive Impact Workshop at EMNLP! Read it here: aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-...
aclanthology.org
Reference-Based Metrics Are Biased Against Blind and Low-Vision Users’ Image Description Preferences
Rhea Kapur, Elisa Kreiss. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact. 2024.
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