The Counterfactual
Sean TrottCognitive Science, statistics, AI.
| Platform |  | Pricing | Freemium | Publishes | Weekly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Issues | 112 | Founded | 4 years ago | Last Issue | 15 days ago |
| Active | |||||
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A field in flux?
In the first year of my cognitive science PhD program, we read a 1973 article by Allen Newell called “You Can’t Play 20 Questions with Nature and Win”1. The article is a commentary on the proceedings of a cognitive psychology conference, in...
Escaping the extrapolator's circle
Research on large language models (LLMs) faces a number of epistemological challenges. I am increasingly convinced that many of these challenges can be fruitfully described as questions about the boundaries or limits of extrapolation. To be...
On the value of open models for LLM-ology research
Scientific research on large language models (LLMs) is relatively recent. This is because LLMs themselves are a very new technology: while artificial neural networks date back to the mid-20th century—and some of the core ideas underlying LL...
How a model got its weights
While writing this piece, an excellent position paper came out on arXiv (Biderman et al., 2026), articulating some of these same arguments about the importance of analyzing training dynamics. I’ve tried to weave some of those arguments into...
Bad habits
In July of 2022—now almost four years ago—I wrote about the possibility that large language models (LLMs) could change the way we use language. This was pre-ChatGPT, but after the release of GPT-3. It was a strange liminal period for resear...
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The writers behind this newsletter.
Assistant Professor at Rutgers University.
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