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Chris Potts

@cgpotts.bsky.social
878 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 · 21/02/2025
My understanding is that it is wise for them to wait on ads until they have sorted out their profit/non-profit status, so that the non-profit is worth as little as possible: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
bloomberg.com
Sure Elon Musk Might Buy OpenAI
Also passthrough fees, memecoins and financial advisers who tell you how to give away all your money.
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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
Joe Boyd is also a pivotal figure in what is probably my favorite podcast episode of all time: @99pi.org episode 141, "Three Records from Sundown", about Nick Drake: 99percentinvisible.org/episode/thre...
99percentinvisible.org
Three Records From Sundown - 99% Invisible
This week on the show we’re presenting one of our favorite radio features, “Three Records from Sundown,” about singer Nick Drake. Neither the devastating beauty of Drake’s music nor the amazing crafts...
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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
And a big thank you to everyone who came to the talk itself. The discussion period after was really rich and wide-ranging.
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
I thank lots of people at the very end for their role in shaping this work. A special shout-out to @aryaman.io for creating CausalGym, which made it very easy for me to conduct all the intervention-based analysis in the talk: github.com/aryamanarora...
github.com
GitHub - aryamanarora/causalgym: CausalGym: Benchmarking causal interpretability methods on linguistic tasks
CausalGym: Benchmarking causal interpretability methods on linguistic tasks - aryamanarora/causalgym
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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 · 01/01/2025
This, from James Gandolfini, is one of the best line deliveries in all of cinema: youtu.be/2GW_KjMoLPw?...
youtu.be
Zero Dark Thirty | Meeting Scene | 100% he's there | Jessica Chastain | Jason Clarke
YouTube video by MovieLegend
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 31/12/2024
I hope those 2 citations are floating around out there for you, but you can also toast to continued year-over-year 200%+ citation count increases in 2025!
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 31/12/2024
I am very fortunate – I experience mostly thoughtful comments here and on Twitter, and so Twitter mostly just offers me more of that. In addition, I do not feel that BlueSky is intrinsically a more considered or caring place than Twitter. I've seen truly awful attacks in both places.
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 31/12/2024
I would like to leave Twitter, but I get engagement from a really broad range of people there, and that's what I am looking for from social media. I like to encourage people getting into my field, and I benefit from consuming the full smorgasbord of hot takes I read there.
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
There may be a bubble, but I think I'd still bet in their favor. It would sound to me like another parallel with Amazon – perhaps the most famous case of a company that was predicted to never be profitable, is sometimes still described that way, but has a market cap of $2.2T.
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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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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
I found it so touching! The Belchers are rare among TV families in being totally supportive of each other. The conflict between the sisters in this episode was so realistic, and treated seriously, and the episode itself was still also very funny.
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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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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
The idea certainly takes some getting used to, and it still seems very mysterious to me if I think about it in a focused way for too long!
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Yes, you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For AI, we've entered an era in which people basically say, "I want to build something with hammers. I don't care what it is. Using hammers is my main requirement."
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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 · 02/12/2024
Yes, I am so bummed about this! I keep looking in vain for the old menu and clicking what turns out to be the Templates button, which I never use.
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
On my reading, that passage shows that they were already considering prompt optimization and decoding time strategies to be adaptations, and the report covers tool-related things as well (RAG). This is what one would expect from the premise that FMs are (important) components of larger solutions.
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
I don't feel positioned to stand by everything in that report (but rather only my section). However, the above quote says "adaptation". Adaptation covers many things beyond fine-tuning. One could argue that it covers so many things as to be vacuous, but not that it was too narrow.
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
I also recommend the one where @trishacode.com and a friend drop a lambo from space. The tone somehow manages to be reverential and disinterested at the same time: youtu.be/4PKuluE_o1A?...
youtu.be
Dropping a Lambo from Space
YouTube video by Trisha Code
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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
Oh, the image appeared. I suppose it was just a CDN issue. I did like the idea that Bluesky might have implemented a 24-hour delay on all Wordle images as a way of further protecting its users.
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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
The Simpsons opening is extremely disorienting. For a really nice explanation: youtu.be/1f5Xt5pZZZM?...
youtu.be
The Best Simpsons Intro Is About Losing Everything You Love
YouTube video by Jacob Geller
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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
It seems like the image isn't showing up. If people are worried about spoilers – this Wordle is almost a year old!
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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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