Greg Leppert

AI and access to knowledge. Executive Director @instdin, Chief Technologist @BKCHarvard

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

When I feel intimidated learning new things, especially systems, I often think about “Fog of War” mapping in RTS games. A FoW map is obscured in darkness, only to be revealed as you explore, tile by tile, until the entire domain is visible.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

Do I repeat myself? Very well then I repeat myself, (I am cooked, I contain maybe 3 or 4 things.)

[EleutherAI @AiEleuther]

The Summer of AI Research 2026 is now accepting applications! Work on an open science AI research project between July 13 and August 16. In this fully online event we invite people with little research experience to contribute to open source under the mentorship of experienced researchers.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

Data 🔄 AI

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

@DavidDuvenaud @AlecRad @status_effects @instdin But if your goal is testing LMs for their ability to predict the future, suddenly there’s reason to care about the qualities of data that knowledge stewards have long valued. Suddenly everyone is working together on the same problems.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

@DavidDuvenaud @AlecRad @status_effects @instdin What’s particularly smart is this team’s aligning of incentives. It’s been difficult to get the AI community to care about data quality beyond hill climbing toward benchmarks perceived as capturing the sota of model behavior.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

@DavidDuvenaud @AlecRad @status_effects @instdin It shouldn’t be missed the profound dedication to data cleanliness and accuracy here. Everyone in the AI community working on and with historical data should take note. This is how we germinate force multipliers between the work of AI builders, historians, and digital humanists.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

If you’re interested in working with us at @instdin to produce state of the art datasets in collaboration with knowledge institutions from across the globe, reach out. We’re hiring deep technologists and community builders. https://t.co/NodK9aTWiW

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

Amazing work from an amazing team using @instdin’s Institutional Books data release. Their dedication to detail and accuracy is sorely missing from the vast majority of historical-data work from the AI community. Yet there’s so much work to be done and benefit to getting it right

[David Duvenaud @DavidDuvenaud]

Announcing Talkie: a new, open-weight historical LLM! We trained and finetuned a 13B model on a newly-curated dataset of only pre-1930 data. Try it below!

with @AlecRad and @status_effects 🧵

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

@nwilliams030 RIP @Svpply

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

@markankcorn @BWarburg @Winterrose @HarvardLIL In our experience, most people didn’t want or need an API—they either wanted wholesale data dumps or to browse specific cases via a GUI. Most API use fell into the former.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

The first child teaches you about yourself. The second child teaches you about the first.

[Lionel Page @page_eco]

All parents think their parenting shapes their child until they have a second child. Then they realise it was the child’s personality all along. (Marvin Zuckerman)

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

Why did the band go hardcore? They were losing money on every gig but figured they could make it up in volume.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

Become undistillable.

[Steve Hou @stevehou]

Apparently workers in China have been creating “colleagues.skill” to distill their coworkers hoping to make them redundant hence saving themselves. In response someone has recently invented an “anti-distillation.skill” that has gone viral on GitHub.🤣

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

Adulthood involves a staggering number of creams.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

Prompt is law.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

https://t.co/wzAHctFzOV

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

If principles are a set, it’s equally important to ensure petty items aren’t added as it is to ensure critical items aren’t removed.

[Greg Leppert @leppert]

I used to think the “sticking” in “stick to your principles” meant holding the line, and it does. But the older I get the more I realize it also means not getting pulled into all the other stuff.