swapnil

Wonderstruck Rabbit-Hole Ranger ✨

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

I really wish the rise of LLMs didn't come along with catastrophic job loss, massive privacy invasions, and maybe also the apocalypse. Because when you put those side effects aside, it is the COOLEST MOST WILD TECHNOLOGY EVER.

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@yacineMTB time to learn some basics

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@_ai_jedi 🤣

[Rishikesh Gajjala @publishiperishi]

I have decided to leave math academia.

Not because of burnout, the academic job market, or a loss of love for mathematics. Surprisingly, it is because of how much mathematics I could do with LLMs over the last few months.

For most of my life, pursuing mathematics felt like the obvious choice. It gave me a sense of purpose, rooted in the search for hidden truths in God’s Book.

Over the past few months, that conviction has been shaken. With LLMs, I could get several breakthroughs on problems I care deeply about and had worked on for years during my PhD. This progress might have taken years of my academic life if not for LLMs.

This could have strengthened my conviction that mathematics was my calling. Instead, it undermined it. With each passing week, my role in the discovery loop seemed to grow smaller.

What made mathematics meaningful to me was never just the final answer. It was the struggle: months or years of exploration, failed approaches, and deep thought before a hidden structure finally became visible. That struggle gave me a sense that the result was truly mine. Prompting my way to answers, without the struggle that once defined the process, no longer felt like the same vocation. The answer might be just as beautiful, but it did not feel earned in the same way.

I now believe that we are rapidly approaching a world in which most answers from God’s Book will be only a prompt away. Once I truly internalized that possibility, dedicating much of my life to finding those answers slightly earlier no longer felt as meaningful as it once had.

But one problem kept bothering me: How do we know the oracle is right?

Intelligence (and hence the amount of math papers) is becoming abundant and cheaper by the day. Trust is not.

The proofs produced by these systems can be highly sophisticated, and their errors can be extremely subtle. Determining whether an apparent breakthrough was actually correct sometimes took me days. Until it is verified, a beautiful proof is not different from slop.

That gap drew me toward formal verification and eventually toward formalizing math proofs in Lean, including proofs of several longstanding conjectures and Erdős problems discovered with the help of LLMs. I began to see verification as a central intellectual bottleneck. Intelligence is useful only when its outputs can be trusted.

So I am leaving math academia. I am shifting my attention from discovering answers to building systems that can certify them.

I am very excited to be joining @PramaanaLabs to work on this challenge. Over the next few years, I hope to help build a future in which increasingly powerful systems are not merely intelligent, but provably correct and reliable across problems far beyond mathematics.

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

I have been building a small transformer interpretability experiment around DistilBERT.

Instead of just visualizing attention, I started ablating individual attention heads and measuring how much the final token representations changed.

After controlling for:

explicit causal words like “because”
semantic relatedness
matched non-causal continuations
multiple-comparison effects
and finally a held-out replication set

a few heads still showed stronger causal-specific impact.

The strongest practical candidates were L6 H3 and L5 H9. On 20 held-out triplets, all 4 pre-registered candidate heads replicated at p < .05, and 3/4 survived a strict Bonferroni correction across the four hypotheses.

This is not evidence of a single “causality head.” It looks more like distributed causal-sensitive processing across a few heads.

Next: trace which token-to-token pathways inside these heads are actually responsible.

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@ChatGPT can I have more than 5 scheduled tasks please ? i am on chatgpt plus

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@GergelyOrosz https://t.co/xPtPbKn86e

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@DeepikaBhardwaj @ndtv @ndtvindia Who runs ndtv

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@LonePasserby @mattpocockuk True, people asking ai about silence. using ai as a slot machine. Like a kid watching cartoons

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@bendee983 Yes

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@suhailmaddie @FI_InvestIndia Also you

[MaDdie @suhailmaddie]

Not gonna lie — the chicken thigh is easily the best piece of chicken. Dunno why people keep hyping up drumsticks.

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@samlambert @flaviocopes Why ?

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@yacineMTB Take care of your body dude

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@tekbog 😂😂

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@typesfast Can’t wait for the GitHub link

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@Sakshi50038 @typesfast Saves time obviously

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@zackvoell 😂

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@mrmendez @yacineMTB Break is a nice option

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

Curiosity need not be extinguished; sometimes it only needs a gentle hand to turn it home.

[swapnil @swapnil_k]

@yacineMTB it may fuck up our dopamine baseline