I’m doing it with LLMs or I’m not doing it at all.

📜 google scholar | ✉️ [email protected]

• Head of Conceptualization Lab
• Second ever Communication & Intelligence researcher
  • Check out our C&I blog
• Assistant Professor at
  • UChicago CS
  • UChicago DSI
  • TTIC (by courtesy)
• Office: Searle 213
• I am actively looking for PhD students to apply through both UChicago CS and the Data Science Institute. Experience with LLMs/generative models is a plus, but not required! I no longer have time to reply to all emails from prospective PhD students but I highly encourage you to check out my lab website and apply!
• Previously:
  • Post-Doc @ FAIR @ Meta
  • PhD from UW advised by Luke Zettlemoyer
• Communication & Intelligence
• Machine Communication
• Generative Models as a Complex Systems Science

Holtzman CV.pdf

I work on pragmatic narrative—stories about models and models that produce stories.

Events

• 2025/10—Excited to give a talk at CMU’s LTI Colloquium seminar on Halloween 🎃👻
• 2025/09—Gave a talk at the COLM Visions of Language Modeling Workshop!
• 2025/07—the Economist published my letter
• 2025/06—gave a talk about Articulating the Ineffable at MMLS!
• 2024/10—The UChicago Communication and Intelligence Symposium was a great success!
• 2024/07—Officially started at UChicago as an Assistant Professor!
• 2023/09—Started a Post-doc at Meta
• 2023/09—Gave a keynote talk at the International Conference on Social Computing about LLMs as Linguistic Spies

Nightly Research Statement

1. Large language models farm corpora for the heuristics and strategies embedded in data. How can we extract the abstractions crystalized in LLMs?
2. What can we do with LLMs that has never been done, or even thought of, before? Can we pushback against the current bounds of ineffability to help humans articulate what was previously inarticulable? Can we make narrative video games with a dense graph of states where one learns through bad decisions instead of replaying failures?

Research Foci