Intellectual Progress in 2024

As always, 2024 has been an interesting year marked by extremely rapid and impressive AI progress. Every year since 2020 has felt like a rollercoaster of AI surging past our expectations, which makes you think there is no way it can possibly go any faster, and then the next year... [Read More]

A Retrospective on Active Inference

Active Inference is a theory of adaptive action selection for agents proposed by Karl Friston initially and now expanded upon by many authors and forms a small academic subfield of research. The core claims of the theory are that action selection and decision-making can be usefully understood as inference problems... [Read More]

Right to Left (R2L) Integer Tokenization

This is a guest post by Max Buckley, a software engineer at Google and fellow AI researcher1. Contributions: Max wrote a draft on this post and did the experiments, Beren provided editorial review. ↩ [Read More]

The Unconditioned Distribution of Current Open LLMs

Last year, I wrote a quick post investigating the ‘unconditioned’ distribution of LLMs in the OpenAI API, where the ‘unconditioned distribution’ is simply the distribution of LLM outputs following the empty string – or beginning of sequence token. My intuition here was that this gives some idea of what the... [Read More]