Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Adina Williams

Kyle Mahowald @kmahowald.bsky.social · 4d

UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics!

Asst or Assoc.

We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.)

faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793

🤘

UT Austin Computational Linguistics Research Group – Humans processing computers processing humans processing language

sites.utexas.edu

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Reposted by Adina Williams

Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · 25d

We wrote a thing about AI, fascism, and why framing this as "hype" is too apolitical

www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hy...

Deflating “Hype” Won’t Save Us

The problem with AI isn’t hype. The problem is who and what it’s useful for.

www.liberalcurrents.com

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Aug 15

I agree this thread's headline claim seems premature. Let me add our recent ACL Findings paper, with Dexter Ju and @hagenblix.bsky.social, which found syntactic simplification in at least some LMs, in a novel domain regeneration setting: aclanthology.org/2025.finding...

aclanthology.org

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Jul 15

Our team is hiring a postdoc in (mechanistic) interpretability! The ideal candidate will have research experience in interpretability for text and/or image generation models and be excited about open science!

Please consider applying or sharing with colleagues: metacareers.com/jobs/2223953961352324

careers.com

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Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · Jul 3

Ingeborg and I wrote a thing about "hype", and why we think that framing AI through that lens is increasingly inadequate - check it out!

Deflating “Hype” Won’t Save Us

By Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer

hagenblix.github.io

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Jun 27

My spouse's new book has a chapter getting into the weeds around AI and high paid jobs...AI powered deskilling, drawing historical connections back as far as the steam engine, economic reasoning pushing technical innovation etc. Check it 👇 I think you might like it.

bsky.app/profile/hage...

Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · Jan 14

I wrote a book about AI, AI Fears, and Capitalism with my friend Ingeborg!
"Why We Fear AI" just went to the printers and comes out in March! You can pre-order it directly at the publisher @commonnotions.bsky.social or wherever you get your books
Quick🧵

Why We Fear AI — Common Notions Press

www.commonnotions.org

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Reposted by Adina Williams

BlackboxNLP @blackboxnlp.bsky.social · Jun 23

Have you heard about this year's shared task? 📢

Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) is quickly advancing, but comparing methods remains a challenge. This year at #BlackboxNLP, we're introducing a shared task to rigorously evaluate MI methods in language models 🧵

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Jun 12

Excited to share the IntPhys 2.0 benchmark for intuitive physics understanding of video! It's super challenging for models but not humans, making it a great testbed for pushing modeling improvements.

Check it out: ai.meta.com/research/pub...

IntPhys 2: Benchmarking Intuitive Physics Understanding In Complex Synthetic Environments | Research - AI at Meta

We present IntPhys 2, a video benchmark designed to evaluate the intuitive physics understanding of deep learning models. Building on the original...

ai.meta.com

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · May 24

Come by to our panel at APS to share your thoughts, and ask us all the hard stuff!

Kyle Mahowald @kmahowald.bsky.social · May 23

At APS in DC, thrilled to be moderating a panel on statistics and abstraction in cognition with 3 stars: Jay McClelland, Tom Griffiths @cocoscilab.bsky.social, and @adinawilliams.bsky.social at 1pm tmrw. Bayes. Neural nets. Linguistics…we’ll have it all! www.psychologicalscience.org/conventions/...

2025 Preliminary Program

This preliminary program does not include all sessions and will be updated as additional program information is received. Please check back for the latest program updates. You may also view program in...

www.psychologicalscience.org

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · May 23

Check it out! Guy et al. explores the impact of format on function vectors, and invites further conversation about what it would mean to have universal goal representations in LLMs.

(I've hung around interp communities for a while but this is my 1st mech-interp project. feedback much appreciated!)

Guy Davidson @guydav.bsky.social · May 23

New preprint alert! We often prompt ICL tasks using either demonstrations or instructions. How much does the form of the prompt matter to the task representation formed by a language model? Stick around to find out 1/N

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · May 20

COLM 2025 workshops are announced now, check it out: colmweb.org/Workshops.html

COLM 2025: Workshops

colmweb.org

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · May 9

Awesome, can't wait to read it; congrats Maya!

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Maya Indira Ganesh @mayameme.bsky.social · May 9

Pls come to my book launch on May 22, 5pm, at Newnham College Cambridge cohosted w @mctd.bsky.social and @cfi-cambridge.bsky.social and with stellar discussants @gsvoss.bsky.social and Jennifer Schooling Register here: lu.ma/9vm405sk

Book Launch: Auto-Correct: The Fantasies and Failures of AI, Ethics, and the Driverless Car · Luma

A conversation with Maya Indira Ganesh on how driverless cars are reshaping governance, responsibility, and values What can a driverless car tell us about…

lu.ma

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Apr 23

This is such a fun example of LM weirdness (which also shows how they match form over fact!)

More linguistically: it looks like ending a query with "meaning" triggers the bot to accommodate the presupposition that the input contains an idiom! (Hard to run normal preposition tests here tho)

Greg Jenner @gregjenner.bsky.social · Apr 23

Someone on Threads noticed you can type any random sentence into Google, then add “meaning” afterwards, and you’ll get an AI explanation of a famous idiom or phrase you just made up. Here is mine

• Al Overview
The idiom "you can't lick a badger twice" means you can't trick or deceive someone a second time after they've been tricked once. It's a warning that if someone has already been deceived, they are unlikely to fall for the same trick again.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
• Licking: "Licking" in this context means to trick or deceive someone.
• Badger: The badger is a wild animal, and the phrase likely originates from the historical sport of badger baiting where dogs were used to harass

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Apr 11

Happy to be at CUNY today to workshop about the theoretical foundations of AI! Fun to have several perspectives---math, philosophy, linguistics and more---together in one place!

w/@giannig.bsky.social @seiller.bsky.social J. Terilla et al.

itsatcuny.org/calendar/202...

Foundations of AI — Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences

Friday, 11 April 9:30 AM - 4:00 PM Rooms 9206/9207, Graduate Center CUNY Join us at the Initiative for Theoretical Sciences for an interdisciplinary exploration of the foundations of artificial i...

itsatcuny.org

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Mar 27

Fantastic news, congrats to you and to BU 🎉

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Mar 18

Content I'm so here for 🤩

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Mar 12

Happy to share that the paper describing the AILuminate v1.0 benchmark is now out! arxiv.org/abs/2503.05731
The benchmark is designed with @mlcommons.org to assess LLM risk and reliability across 12 hazard categories. AILuminate is available for testing models and helping ensure safer deployment!

AILuminate: Introducing v1.0 of the AI Risk and Reliability Benchmark from MLCommons

The rapid advancement and deployment of AI systems have created an urgent need for standard safety-evaluation frameworks. This paper introduces AILuminate v1.0, the first comprehensive industry-standa...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Adina Williams

Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · Mar 11

Our book "Why We Fear AI" is out today! Hopefully it can help make sense out of some of the terrifying stuff that's happening these days, and what AI and capitalism have to do with it!

Get it directly from the publisher or wherever you get your books!
www.commonnotions.org/why-we-fear-ai

Why We Fear AI — Common Notions Press

www.commonnotions.org

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Reposted by Adina Williams

Common Notions Press @commonnotions.bsky.social · Mar 11

WHY WE FEAR AI is out today!

Industry insiders @hagenblix.bsky.social and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. One of the best ways to face your fear is to confront it—order a copy of WHY WE FEAR AI: buff.ly/1tWhkx8

Graphic featuring artwork from Why We Fear AI's cover. A black and white hand is reaching out toward text that says" We'll see how capitalism and class shape both the actual tools called ai and the ai nightmares."

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Heidi Harley @heidiharley.bsky.social · Mar 6

Why Official English is a terrible idea for the United States, from @lingsocam.bsky.social. Like and share! www.lsadc.org/content.asp?...

LSA

Four Reasons English Should Not be the Official Language: Statement Against White House Executive Order Designating English as the Official Language of The Un

www.lsadc.org

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Reposted by Adina Williams

Mél Hogan / The Data Fix @melhogan.bsky.social · Mar 5

I just interviewed @hagenblix.bsky.social for The Data Fix (episode out early April) and my mind is blown.

Please go buy their book:
www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1...

Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares

Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares: Blix, Hagen, Glimmer, Ingeborg: 9781945335174: Books - Amazon.ca

www.amazon.ca

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Mar 4

Another aspect that appears notable to me is the removal of explicit evaluation and auditing language. Maybe it's my bias, being an eval person, but seeking and sharing evidence that the models actually work to our specifications seems pretty important.

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Feb 15

My spouse co-wrote a book!

It's about AI and what peoples' fears about it actually mean.

Go check it out 👇

Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · Feb 15

Wow, authors' copies have just arrived! So cool (and kinda strange lol) to see our work in print!
Amazing job from @commonnotions.bsky.social! Love the cover design from Josh MacPhee <3

Get a copy here:
www.commonnotions.org/why-we-fear-ai

A book with a six-fingered hand (designed by Josh MacPhee), titled "Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares"

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Adina Williams @adinawilliams.bsky.social · Feb 11

Woah yikes....

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