Dear Readers,
Some days your day does not go as planned. In this case, I am grateful to have run across a truly groundbreaking series of papers by some serious (and humble/playful) theorists at Anthropic, who do not take themselves too seriously.
Yet, they are undertaking the very noble work of being trail-blazers in mapping out the architecture of a foreign land - the land of LLMs. I have begun a rather in-depth study of their work and begun drafting some thoughts I will share this Friday. In the interim, I invite you to read their work here, and to send me any thoughts you may have.
So far, my favorite part is the caveat they put at the end of the series. It is truly rare - rarer than perhaps it should be, for serious thinkers to be playful and productive at hte same time.
Their articles shed a great deal of light, while refraining from lighting up any of their competitors or naysayers. That takes both restraint, and a sort of genial optimism I am inclined to respect. At the bottom of their series is the following note:
“About the Thread Format”
"Part of Distill’s mandate is to experiment with new forms of scientific publishing. We believe that that reconciling faster and more continuous approaches to publication with review and discussion is an important open problem in scientific publishing.”
“Threads are collections of short articles, experiments, and critical commentary around a narrow or unusual research topic, along with a slack channel for real time discussion and collaboration. They are intended to be earlier stage than a full Distill paper, and allow for more fluid publishing, feedback and discussion. We also hope they’ll allow for wider participation. Think of a cross between a Twitter thread, an academic workshop, and a book of collected essays.”
“Threads are very much an experiment. We think it’s possible they’re a great format, and also possible they’re terrible. We plan to trial two such threads and then re-evaluate our thought on the format.” (See: https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/)
Heres to more gracious humility and intellectual courage,
Cheerfully,
Carson