Marco Zocca
@ocramz.bsky.social
320 followers 700 following 640 posts
ML, λ • language and the machines that understand it • https://ocramz.github.io
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Pinned
ocramz.bsky.social
CERN for frontier AI >>>
ocramz.bsky.social
audacity v4 looks to becoming a proper DAW so.. perhaps soon?
ocramz.bsky.social
the kids figured out an interesting "pair layback" #climbing technique
ocramz.bsky.social
but the problem persists as long as there is a public "view" or API from which bots can scrape.

I would love to believe that adding one more layer of tech indirection will "feed the wolf while sparing the chickens" but I simply don't.
ocramz.bsky.social
iiuc atproto supports already private data servers, whereas bsky does not. Would love to learn more about this discrepancy
ocramz.bsky.social
This sounds like a great shared task for the next NeurIPS
dlevenstein.bsky.social
So I get that a Neuroscientist Couldn’t Understand a Microprocessor, and TBH I’m ok with that. But could a neuroscientist understand a deep RNN? Because that seems like a more pressing issue.

*assuming you think the brain operates through the parallel activity of many connected input/output units
ocramz.bsky.social
days since inspecting the data as a first thing would have saved hours of work: 0
ocramz.bsky.social
what changed in v2 and v3?
ocramz.bsky.social
anyway, @kelseyhightower.com had a rather simpler point around chaining bash commands. We could take a page from probabilistic programming and finally acknowledge that even regular bash commands are nondeterministic if you open a socket or file, and model that at the type level
ocramz.bsky.social
yes but the fundamental shift is for _tools_ to be nondeterministic and not have accountability at the same time.
ocramz.bsky.social
kids figuring out language compositionality eary:

my 4yo is on a swing next to her friend, who speaks little english still.

As I tell my kid to have a nice day at school, she replies "si papà", and the other one "si, <name>'s papa" 🐵🐵
ocramz.bsky.social
shall we control for "entities that are in the pocket or have a direct stake into the companies in question"? bc that's what I feel is the axis of this issue
ocramz.bsky.social
Thank you for elaborating your view; I learned something new today.
ocramz.bsky.social
being able to do all experiments in silico means that we can be more deliberate with interventions, and that much more can be controlled for.

I think MI is still figuring out how to control for one factor at a time.
ocramz.bsky.social
building theory is generally slower than making gpu go brr, you'll agree on that :)
ocramz.bsky.social
as a matter of fact "interpretable ML" is way broader than "mech interp for deep learning", and has an much more complex history of methods and results.
ocramz.bsky.social
the common thread is the vast and barely coherent phenomenology and the lack of a consensus on even the right observation methods.
ocramz.bsky.social
I mean, I care that it doesn't break and that it serves me well, but do I feel for it?
ocramz.bsky.social
this is super interesting, and a thought I also recently had.

I really must ask though whether having an attachment or a functional dependency on some piece of tech is really the same as empathizing or even identifying with it.
ocramz.bsky.social
Circuits as minimal explanations of behaviour is a worthwile goal but very hard to pull off, as eg transformer blocks compensate for ablations.

Finding "knowledge" or little switches like the denial direction or the evil vector are fun tricks but not super interesting.
ocramz.bsky.social
great q. I think currently the answer
is: multiple overlapping problems. A good recent taxonomy is The quest for the right mediator by @amuuueller.bsky.social . A recent review called "Open problems in mech interp" is also a good reference.

As a sci field, it's still figuring out the microscope.
ocramz.bsky.social
please elaborate on how would that work out.
ocramz.bsky.social
I think we're only doing very high-d now :)
ocramz.bsky.social
yes, all added together in the residual stream