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Chris Potts

@cgpotts.bsky.social

800 followers 310 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. https://web.stanford.edu/~cgpotts/

web.stanford.edu

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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Nov 28

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 · Feb 21

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...

Sure Elon Musk Might Buy OpenAI

Also passthrough fees, memecoins and financial advisers who tell you how to give away all your money.

www.bloomberg.com

Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Feb 14

@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 · Jan 27

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...

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...

99percentinvisible.org

Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Jan 27

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...

The Big Pink - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Jan 13

And a big thank you to everyone who came to the talk itself. The discussion period after was really rich and wide-ranging.

Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Jan 13

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 - aryamanarora/causalgym: CausalGym: Benchmarking causal interpretability methods on linguistic tasks

CausalGym: Benchmarking causal interpretability methods on linguistic tasks - aryamanarora/causalgym

github.com

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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Jan 13

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

Finding linguistic structure in large language models

YouTube video by Chris Potts

youtu.be

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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Jan 1

This, from James Gandolfini, is one of the best line deliveries in all of cinema: youtu.be/2GW_KjMoLPw?...

Zero Dark Thirty | Meeting Scene | 100% he's there | Jessica Chastain | Jason Clarke

YouTube video by MovieLegend

youtu.be

Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Dec 31

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 · Dec 31

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.

Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Dec 31

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 · Dec 30

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.

Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Dec 30

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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Reposted by Chris Potts

Betsy Sneller @betsysneller.bsky.social · Dec 18

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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Reposted by Chris Potts

Conference on Language Modeling @colmweb.org · Dec 17

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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Reposted by Chris Potts

Aniello De Santo @anids.bsky.social · Dec 10

Ok but this last episode of Bob’s Burgers was so wonderful #bobsburgers

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Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Dec 11

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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Reposted by Chris Potts

Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · Dec 9

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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Reposted by Chris Potts

Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · Dec 9

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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Reposted by Chris Potts

Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · Dec 9

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 · Dec 5

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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Reposted by Chris Potts

Stanford NLP Group @stanfordnlp.bsky.social · Dec 4

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 · Dec 4

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!

Chris Potts @cgpotts.bsky.social · Dec 4

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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Reposted by Chris Potts

Ramesh Manuvinakurike @rameshddrr.bsky.social · Dec 4

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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