On the Good Fight podcast w substack.com/@yaschamounk I give a quick but careful primer on how modern AI works.

I also chat about our responsibility as machine learning scientists, and what we need to fix to get AI right.

Take a listen and reshare -

www.persuasion.community/p/david-bau

Who is going to be at #COLM2025?

I want to draw your attention to a COLM paper by my student @sfeucht.bsky.social that has totally changed the way I think and teach about LLM representations. The work is worth knowing.

And you can meet Sheridan at COLM, Oct 7!
bsky.app/profile/sfe...

[📄] Are LLMs mindless token-shifters, or do they build meaningful representations of language? We study how LLMs copy text in-context, and physically separate out two types of induction heads: token heads, which copy literal tokens, and concept heads, which copy word meanings.

I'm searching for some comp/ling experts to provide a precise definition of “slop” as it refers to text (see: corp.oup.com/word-of-the-...)

I put together a google form that should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete: forms.gle/oWxsCScW3dJU...
If you can help, I'd appreciate your input! 🙏

4. Finally, we look at how such interventions can be used to detect implicit biases in clinical tasks. We mechanistically control gender/race and find that Olmo considers females to be at higher risk of depression than males, and Black patients to be at higher risk than white patients.

3. Race is more complicated. We find multiple patches and are able to intervene to a degree.

2. These patches generalize to non-clinical domains!

1. We perform activation patching in the context of clinical vignette generation and find that gender information is highly localized. Patching MLP activations in a single layer consistently alters patient gender.

LLMs are known to perpetuate social biases in clinical tasks. Can we locate and intervene upon LLM activations that encode patient demographics like gender and race? 🧵

Work w/ @arnabsensharma.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social, @davidbau.bsky.social, @byron.bsky.social

arxiv.org/abs/2502.13319