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Thennal D K

@thennal.bsky.social
42 followers 397 following 31 posts

nlp researcher, fan of fungi any/all, english/മലയാളം/日本語 thennal.net

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Reposted by Thennal D K
Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Maybe worth saying aloud that I do worry about safety risks (hacking, bio, an “out of control” agent). I just also see those risks as deeply entangled with money, politics, personalities, regulation, such that I doubt we can “solve safety” if we don’t first address foundational issues.
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Mike Rugnetta @mikerugnetta.com · 30/09/2026
“lately, she’s been filming AI how-to content on topics like how to get an AI assistant to buy you groceries so you can make Goop Kitchen’s Brentwood Chinese chicken salad at home”
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
this is what happens when you're interviewed by piers morgan
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 16/09/2026
LLMs won’t wipe out humanity because they just don’t have that dog in them.
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
if they do have a dog in them it definitely has rabies so it's probably a moot point
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 14/09/2026
It rules that in 2026 you can steal $600,000 just by asking politely
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
it's a very specific conceptualization, and all the theories metaoptimizers and paperclip doomsday scenarios flow from that. LLMs and their development simply don't fit that in any real way.
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
i think part of the hitch is that bostrom and his ilk thought the primary way to Do AI is some sort of self-improvement mechanism, instead of just "here's the majority of human text created in the last twenty years, now mimic that"
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 08/09/2026
many of you are spending far too much energy on finite time blowups when you should be striving for a finite time glow up
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
lots of similar work as well, here's ours specifically about how LLMs always seem to write the same generic story: arxiv.org/abs/2606.17350
arxiv.org
Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested....
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leon @leyawn.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
post by leyawn

jester, roast this peasant child for saying i have no clothes on. more vulgar, jester. use the forbidden words
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 27/08/2026
I also continue to believe that my mental model is the best one, which does not conceptualize the “agents” as discrete entities, but rather as the protagonists in a story that the LLM has been trained to write about a cool little guy who goes on hacker adventures.
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Court rules “Mambo No. 6” must be written by a human
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Alane Suhr @suhr.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Wittgenstein would love this game en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Libs
en.wikipedia.org
Mad Libs - Wikipedia
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
It’s not becoming a little guy but it is become a weird language calculator and we’d be better off if we dropped the “little dude’s arriving soon” shit & think about wtf a language calculator is instead
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
they wasted ten morbillion on the metaverse they deserve a little mass surveillance tool branded for creeps, as a treat
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
I'd wager its pure name recognition. aeneid is deep lore for most people
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
given that even on a broad abstract narrative level LLMs are unable to generate a diverse set of stories, I believe this is likely to be a fundamental result of the training objective itself
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
very nice work, tracks with our recent paper too: arxiv.org/abs/2606.17350
arxiv.org
Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested....
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
every time I see a violin plot in a paper I take compounding psychic damage
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 15/05/2026
I still always think about the early AI paper (circa 2023?) paper where they get people to guess whether a poem is by a famous poet or ChatGPT and the people perform worse than chance and when you dig a bit deeper into the data you find it’s because they simply hate the real poems
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
why I stick to the posters, at least there's some back and forth to wake you up
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Moving beyond training data explanations doesn’t cede ground, it’s actually a less mystically charged combo of code & ranking algos, while data-at-scale has a culty “accumulation of information creates thinking” motivation that is low-key reinforced when credited with increasingly complex language
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eternalist @eternalism-when.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
the millions of dollars spent ensuring that LLMs always glaze you might actually be worth it if it eventually keeps richard dawkins away from polite society
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Hans Hatzel @hanshatzel.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Joint translation and label projection does not hurt translation performance! Our paper "Just Use XML: Revisiting Joint Translation and Label Projection" (accepted to ACL Findings) rejects the idea that label projection for span annotations should be performed as a secondary step after translation.
arxiv.org
Just Use XML: Revisiting Joint Translation and Label Projection
Label projection is an effective technique for cross-lingual transfer, extending span-annotated datasets from a high-resource language to low-resource ones. Most approaches perform label projection as a separate step after machine translation, and prior work that combines the two reports degraded translation quality. We re-evaluate this claim with LabelPigeon, a novel framework that jointly performs translation and label projection via XML tags. We design a direct evaluation scheme for label projection, and find that LabelPigeon outperforms baselines and actively improves translation quality in 11 languages. We further assess translation quality across 203 languages and varying annotation complexity, finding consistent improvement attributed to additional fine-tuning. Finally, across 27 languages and three downstream tasks, we report substantial gains in cross-lingual transfer over comparable work, up to +39.9 F1 on NER. Overall, our results demonstrate that XML-tagged label projection provides effective and efficient label transfer without compromising translation quality.
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
dead internet theory but it's just agents emailing eachother
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
to take a wittgensteinian stance, llm consciousness is a needless anthropomorphization. whether llms are conscious does not need to be relevant to downstream concerns (whether it has moral worth or agency, etc) and the question itself is a kind of linguistic confusion imo.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 11/11/2025
What do you do after you’re done jumping the shark? Whatever it is, Nature Careers is all in.
Nature
CAREER COLUMN
11 November 2025
I have Einstein, Bohr and Feynman in my pocket
Grappling with difficulties in your career? Try asking an Al-powered advisory panel of experts, suggests Carsten Lund Pedersen.The make-up of my advisory board often changes, and has included an eclectic mix.
Besides Bohr, Feynman and Einstein, I've also tapped microbiologist Alexander Fleming, poet Piet Hein and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela. Sometimes I include experts from my specific disciplines of Al and marketing; other times, l 'invite' artist Pablo Picasso or architect Bjarke Ingels for a completely different perspective. But whatever the board's composition, I typically retain a core group of three seminal scientists.
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
the kneejerk reaction of "just RLHF it away" to every issue with LLMs isn't great either imo
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
there is practically no way to tell if it's a homework question or not, given the student is smart enough to at least remove any paraphernalia
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Stop using Word Error Rate! The lovely @sthirkal.bsky.social and I made a poster for my recent NAACL 2025 Findings paper, highlighting the issues in multilingual ASR evaluation and proposing viable alternatives.
A poster describing the content of our paper.
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Arianna Bisazza @arianna-bis.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Modern LLMs "speak" hundreds of languages... but do they really? Multilinguality claims are often based on downstream tasks like QA & MT, while *formal* linguistic competence remains hard to gauge in lots of languages Meet MultiBLiMP! (joint work w/ @jumelet.bsky.social & @weissweiler.bsky.social)
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Shana Gadarian @sgadarian.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
International students will stop coming to American universities if their visas are going to be at risk. This will make our intellectual community poorer and also make tuition more expensive for domestic students.
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
maybe, but my latest paper is partly on how openai didn't ever bother to proofread their evaluation code and fucked it up for a lot of languages back when they released Whisper so like
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
not saying there aren't people working on it, just that they're severely outnumbered by the people throwing sphagetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, at least in the academic circles I've seen
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
one of the big issues with AI research is the lack of people stopping to evaluate the possibilities and limitations of the new funky model
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
It's generally true that long-standing experts will be conservative in predictions like these though. True in the case of climate change, scientists often downplay the effects if anything, every climate model update is "whoops it was worse than we thought!"
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The Onion @theonion.com · 05/02/2025
FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States
theonion.com
FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States
WASHINGTON—Putting the nation on alert against what it has described as a “highly credible terrorist threat,” the FBI announced today that it has uncovered a plot by members of al-Qaeda to sit back an...
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Alane Suhr @suhr.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
Most of my colleagues are shocked when I bring up these comments to them. Being in academia doesn't mean we are protected, or even simply ignored by this. We and our institutions are being actively attacked by policies like funding freezes, and I don't see why it wouldn't get worse than that.
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Peli Grietzer @peligrietzer.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
We need a name for the 'paradox' where frontier LLMs are useful in domain x if your expertise in domain x go much deeper than theirs and harmful otherwise
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Jonathan Peelle @jpeelle.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
My university (Northeastern) got rid of their page on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and redirected the URL to a page on "belonging". It's not clear to me how a private university having a page on their values violates the law? web.archive.org/web/20250124...
web.archive.org
Office of Belonging – Belonging at Northeastern
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Abhilasha Ravichander @lasha.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
We are launching HALoGEN💡, a way to systematically study *when* and *why* LLMs still hallucinate. New work w/ Shrusti Ghela*, David Wadden, and Yejin Choi 💫 📝 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.08292 🚀 Code/Data: github.com/AbhilashaRav... 🌐 Website: halogen-hallucinations.github.io 🧵 [1/n]
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George Takei @georgetakei.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
This is what the government did with 120K+ Japanese Americans in 1942. I know. I was there in those camps.
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
Happy to share that this paper has now been accepted at NAACL 2025!
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Jeremy Howard @howard.fm · 19/12/2024
I'll get straight to the point. We trained 2 new models. Like BERT, but modern. ModernBERT. Not some hypey GenAI thing, but a proper workhorse model, for retrieval, classification, etc. Real practical stuff. It's much faster, more accurate, longer context, and more useful. 🧵
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 19/12/2024
Here's why "alignment research" when it comes to LLMs is a big mess, as I see it. Claude is not a real guy. Claude is a character in the stories that an LLM has been programmed to write. Just to give it a distinct name, let's call the LLM "the Shoggoth".
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Sam Power @spmontecarlo.bsky.social · 27/12/2024
I saw recently that this had been cited in some lecture notes, so I decided to try to preserve it for posterity (since the original tweet had been deleted by me in the interim).
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Thennal D K @thennal.bsky.social · 27/12/2024
to the extent with which several SE paradigms are generally unnecessary for research code, its still good to know. judgement call to be made there but
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