[FRIAM] "how we turn thoughts into sentences"
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Thu Jul 17 13:20:49 EDT 2025
https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-decode-how-we-turn-thoughts-into-sentences/
I'm hoping/expecting some folks here are as fascinated with these things
as I am? LLM's, interperatability, natural vs are to me as
weather/vortices/entropy-intuition is to Nick?
As someone who spends way too much time composing sentences (in writing)
through this impedence-mismatched interface (keyboard) I have a strong
(if misleading, or at least ideosyncratic) apprehension of how I might
form sentences from thoughts, and perhaps even forward/back propogate
possible expressions and structures *all the way* to where I imagine my
interlocutors (often all y'all here) reading and responding internally
(mentally) and online. My engagement with the LLMs in "casual
conversation" includes a great deal of this, albeit understanding that
I'm talking to "a stochastic parrot" or more aptly perhaps "making faces
into a funhouse mirror" (reminding me that I really want to compose a
good-faith answer to glen's very sincere and I think pivotal questions
about metaphor).
I haven't parsed the linked article deeply yet and have not sought out
the actual paper itself yet, but find the ideas presented very
provocative or at least evocative? It triggers hopeful imaginings about
connections with the cortical column work of Hawkins/Numenta as well as
the never ending topics of FriAM: " Effing the inEffabl"e and "Metaphors
all the way Down?"
I don't expect this line of research to *answer* those questions, but
possibly shed some scattered light onto their periphery (oupsie, I waxed
up another metapho to shoot some curls)? For example, might the
electrocorticography during ideation-to-speech transmogrification show
us how strongly metaphorical constructions differ from more concise or
formal analogical versions (if they are a spectrum) or how attempts to
"eff the ineffable" might yield widely branching (bushy) explorations,
ending in some kind of truncation by fatigue or (de)saturation?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00270-1
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00270-1>
And are attempts at Interpreting LLMs in some meaningful way colinear or
offer important parallax (to reference the "steam-engine/thermodynamics"
duality)?
And me, here, with obviously "way too much time" on my hands and a
fascination with LLMs and an urgency to try to keep traction on the
increasing slope of "the singularity" and a mild facility with visual
analytics and *I* haven't even begun to keep up... This list
(ironically) was formulated by GPT and I've not (and surely will not) do
much double-checking beyond (hopefully) diving deep(er) inoto the work.
I was mildly surprised there were no 2025 references... I'm guessing
the blogs are running commentary including current work. I'll go click
through as soon as I hit <send> here (imagine the next-token prediction
I am doing as I decide to try to stop typing and hit <send>?)
*“A Survey of Explainability and Interpretability in Large Language
Models”* (ACM Computing Surveys, 2024)
Comprehensive classification of methods, with comparisons between
mechanistic and post‑hoc approaches.
Preprint link on arXiv: [arXiv:2310.01789]
<https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01789>
*Anthropic’s Interpretability Research Pages* (2023–2024)
https://www.anthropic.com/research
*OpenAI’s Technical Blog: “Language Models and Interpretability”* (2023)
Discussion of interpretability challenges, with examples from
GPT‑4-level models:
https://openai.com/research
*NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on XAI for Large Models*
Video talks & proceedings with up-to-date methods:
https://nips.cc/virtual/2023/workshop/66533
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