Now published in open access! Your one-stop shop for the philosophy of language models. It's the spiritual descendant of our two-part preprint from 2024, fully updated. This should be particularly useful for anyone looking for an entry point into this rapidly growing field.
Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1
An unapologetically angry post about what’s being done to US science:
The success of large language models (LLMs) across many domains of AI research has generated intense debate. Some attribute their impressive performance on complex tasks to human-like linguistic and ...
H1B visas were historically key for postdocs and research scientists (and future PIs and professors) - and the fee threatened to totally derail that pipeline. This is good news.
Raphaël Millière
Gabor Brody
Dear colleagues, PLEASE submit a comment against OMB's proposed rule. Elizabeth wrote great guide on drafting a comment. To submit it, go to www.regulations.gov/search and search for OMB-2026-0034. It will take time & effort to write a good comment, but a worthwhile effort to save our profession.
There's a persistent fantasy that maybe some other nice countries will start mass-hiring US scientists.
That's not going to happen. A few high-profile, big name researchers will get poached, sure. But most countries, including some very nice ones, are underemploying their own scientists already.
New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!!
Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...
New paper in Open Mind! 2-to-4-year-olds find it easier to reason about an object's possible identity than its possible location, and we argue this asymmetry traces back to the architecture of early object representations. 🧵
