Published in Better Programming·Mar 10Large Language Models Don’t “Hallucinate”Using this term attributes properties to the LLMs they don’t have while also ignoring the real dynamics behind the production of their made-up information — You hear it everywhere. Whenever someone discusses the tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to make up facts or present fictional information, they say the LLM is hallucinating. Beyond simply being a term used by the media, it is also used by researchers and laypeople alike to refer…Artificial Intelligence6 min readArtificial Intelligence6 min read
Mar 8The Emotional Lives of RL AgentsIntroduction When psychologists discuss mental content, they typically divide it into two broad categories: thoughts (cognition) and emotions (affect). The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has focused extensively on understanding and simulating cognition in machines. Especially in the past decade this approach has seen great success, with more and more human-like…Reinforcement Learning14 min readReinforcement Learning14 min read
Jan 24The Five-Tier Hierarchical ParliamentBlueprint For A Bottom-up “One-World Government” — Introduction This essay is a thought experiment in political theory. From reading Plato’s Republic in high school to closely following both local US politics and world politics for the past decade, I have maintained an interest in political philosophy. How best to govern? Free from all actual historical restrictions, what would…Philosophy12 min readPhilosophy12 min read
Jan 1What I Read In 2022Happy New Year! For the past few years I have compiled lists of the books that I read in the previous year. This post consists of a list of the books that I read in 2022, along with some thoughts I have on each. I’ve divided the list into fiction…Literature10 min readLiterature10 min read
Dec 7, 2022Reflections on a year studying “Consciousness and AI”I know this blog has been a little quiet recently. If you followed my work in the past, you might be wondering what I have been up to the past year or so, after leaving Unity in early 2021. Working on ML-Agents the previous four years was an incredibly rewarding…Artificial Intelligence16 min readArtificial Intelligence16 min read
Jan 26, 2022Interaction-Grounded Learning: Learning from feedback, not rewardsIn a typical reinforcement learning problem, an agent situated in an environment makes observations, takes actions, and receives rewards. The goal of the agent is to learn to receive the largest sum of (sometimes discounted) rewards possible. To do so, the reward at each time-step is used to adjust the…Machine Learning5 min readMachine Learning5 min read
Jul 20, 2021Thoughts on “The Enigma of Reason”I recently read The Enigma of Reason by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier. As the title suggests, the book attempts to make sense of what seems to be a paradox of human’s ability to reason. The book seeks to explain how a mechanism which has been assumed to have evolved…Psychology5 min readPsychology5 min read
Apr 12, 2021Japanese Role Playing Games as a Meta Reinforcement Learning BenchmarkA Proposal — The field of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DeepRL) has made significant gains in the past half-decade. To go from sometimes solving simple Atari games to achieving superhuman performance in complex modern games like Starcraft 2 and DOTA in such a short time is quite an accomplishment. Indeed, given such successes one…Reinforcement Learning10 min readReinforcement Learning10 min read
Apr 6, 2021Thoughts on “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World”When I shared my thoughts on the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, I expressed the hope that the book would present a sweeping and all-encompassing theory of human culture. Despite being compelling in its own right, it largely failed to live up to such an expectation. On the other…Philosophy9 min readPhilosophy9 min read
Feb 12, 2021Thoughts on “Symbolic Behavior in Artificial Intelligence”I recently read a new pre-print titled Symbolic Behaviour in Artificial Intelligence, by Adam Santoro, Andrew Lampinen, and collaborators at DeepMind, and was so taken by it that I thought I would write up some brief thoughts. Unlike much of the research published by DeepMind, which is largely empirical in…Artificial Intelligence4 min readArtificial Intelligence4 min read
