I’m doing it with LLMs or I’m not doing it at all.
📜 google scholar | ✉️ [email protected] | 💡ideahub
Holtzman CV.pdf
I work on pragmatic narrative—stories about models and models that produce stories.
Events
Some things I’m interested in right now:
- I want to figure out how Transformer LLMs communicate with themselves in the residual stream. In my opinion, both the alignment and MechInterp communities have become somewhat less ambitious. I’ve often said that I think MechInterp is overrated. I think MechInterp is very cool—just the vast majority of students want to do MechInterp, when I think behavioral work is where much of our insight comes from. But, I’m slowly becoming convinced that Transformer LLMs are simpler than I thought, they just don’t line-up with the kind of explanations people were looking for, so I’m throwing my hat back into MechInterp after being briefly excited and then abandoning it in 2021.
- I think we should build communication games, games where the main mechanic is communication. There are some (Disco Elysium, Chants of Sennaar, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, etc.), but I want ones that are NPC-driven (not MMORPGs or friend-group co-ops) and use LLMs to build a novel social ecosystem you have to navigate. This will happen, let’s be a part of it!
- The jury is still out on whether passive-learning based AI can ever produce truly interesting media. My guess is yes, but I’m excited to look at this either way. Let’s see if LLMs have a story to tell or two!
- For other ideas, see my twitter or IdeaHub