Stella Biderman
@stellaathena.bsky.social
5.4K followers 350 following 330 posts
I make sure that OpenAI et al. aren't the only people who are able to study large scale AI systems.
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stellaathena.bsky.social
That was the best I was able to find, I swear I've read others though.
stellaathena.bsky.social
It doesn't directly address your original question though... maybe I should write a blog post about it.
stellaathena.bsky.social
You can't train a LLM like that without multiple revolutionary breakthroughs. It's a common talking point from people who are grifters or clueless, but the technology simply doesn't work like that.
stellaathena.bsky.social
I feel like there are several blog posts or papers that put forth a research agenda of "making AI research a scientific field" or "advancing the science of AI" or something like that. I'm trouble finding them, does this ring a bell to anyone / does anyone have links to notable examples?
stellaathena.bsky.social
Obviously she assaulted him /s
Reposted by Stella Biderman
eugenevinitsky.bsky.social
I want to print it out giant and put it everywhere

No, it’s not The Incentives—it’s you

There’s a narrative I find kind of troubling, but that unfortunately seems to be growing more common in science. The core idea is that the mere existence of perverse incentives is a valid and sufficient reason to knowingly behave in an antisocial way, just as long as one first acknowledges the existence of those perverse incentives. The way this dynamic usually unfolds is that someone points out some fairly serious problem with the way many scientists behave—say, our collective propensity to p-hack as if it’s going out of style, or the fact that we insist on submitting our manuscripts to publishers that are actively trying to undermine our interests—and then someone else will say, “I know, right—but what are you going to do, those are the incentives.”
stellaathena.bsky.social
This is always dire, but especially so when the US is being run by an authoritarian who delights in using state power to go after people he dislikes. The second OpenAI starts asking for your ID, the government will be asking OpenAI for your chats.
stellaathena.bsky.social
OpenAI says adult chats deserve confidentiality, then single out teens for surveillance and says that they'll call the cops on people with mental health crises.

This will kill people and not help them get the care they need. It happens all the time

www.vera.org/news/we-need...
We Need to Think Beyond Police in Mental Health Crises
In March of 2020, Joe Prude called 911 for assistance. His brother, Daniel Prude, was behaving erratically and had just bolted out the back door of Joe…
www.vera.org
stellaathena.bsky.social
The new “teen safety” program from OpenAI repeats the same lies that companies and governments have been saying since the internet began. This won't achieve better online safety for kids, but it will suppress individual liberty and promote censorship.

openai.com/index/buildi...
Building towards age prediction
Learn how OpenAI is building age prediction and parental controls in ChatGPT to create safer, age-appropriate experiences for teens while supporting families with new tools.
openai.com
Reposted by Stella Biderman
lizthegrey.com
the *cato* institute says less than 10% of politically motivated terrorism is caused by leftists. the *cato* institute.

more than two-thirds is from the far-right.
constant-tummyache.bsky.social
Charts don’t lie. Well, unbiased ones anyways
stellaathena.bsky.social
There are some papers demonstrating that this improves performance, especially in translation contexts IIRC.
stellaathena.bsky.social
It's also a pretty notable comment about my friend group that when I wrote this comment I was considering "partner" to be the opposite-gender counterpart of "girlfriend"
Reposted by Stella Biderman
nsaphra.bsky.social
How can an imitative model like an LLM outperform the experts it is trained on? Our new COLM paper outlines three types of transcendence and shows that each one relies on a different aspect of data diversity. arxiv.org/abs/2508.17669
stellaathena.bsky.social
How did you learn to present code? Are there resources that you recommend using to help teach people?
stellaathena.bsky.social
Good luck! Maybe you'll succeed where people have failed for decades.
stellaathena.bsky.social
Same

(Since I don't know most of the people in this thread, the joke is that I run one of the servers Naomi mentioned. Except it's not a joke.)
stellaathena.bsky.social
I have so few straight friends that "partner" to me is mostly coded as "bi but in a relationship with someone of the opposite gender"
stellaathena.bsky.social
You're right that this is an active area of research but I'm unaware of any meaningful successes coming out of it.
stellaathena.bsky.social
Can you name an example of an idea that is well-grounded in biology that has proven successful for neural networks? I don't mean "oh DL was inspired by how non-neuroscientists thinks the brain works," I mean an actual case of making a model work better by making it more brain-like
stellaathena.bsky.social
Digging into unpopular positions with no evidence while the rest of the world passes them by is basically my expectation for sufficiently senior folk.
Reposted by Stella Biderman
Reposted by Stella Biderman
scasper.bsky.social
Here are a couple of slides that I presented yesterday at #aitechgov about open-weight model risk management.
Reposted by Stella Biderman
eff.org
“Your driver's license contains a ton of somewhat immutable information about you” like your name, address, DOB, and face, EFF’s Lisa Femia told the @thetennesean.bsky.social. It's not like a credit card number that can be replaced if it's leaked.
Age verification laws are sweeping the US, changing the future of online speech
Age verification laws have been passed in at least 24 states. Some say it’s an effort to protect kids, while others say it restricts protected speech.
www.tennessean.com