Enzo Doyen

What coders lose by relying on AI. From our event with the University of Washington Office of Public Lectures.

(with @emilymbender.bsky.social)

ChatGPT Translate translating "nurse" as "female nurse" into French, with no gender bias notice or any alternative suggestion

Almost 7 years after Prates et al./Stanovsky et al.'s papers, have we not learned anything?

(ChatGPT Translate translating "nurse" as "female nurse" into French, with no gender bias notice or any alternative suggestion)

blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...

FYI the blog post for the updated policy is out. Our llm future is dire:/

> be a language model
> all you see is tokens
> you don't care, it's all abstracted away
> you live for a world of pure ideas, chain of concepts, reasoning streams
> tokens don't exist.

Robin Lakoff, Expert on Language and Gender, Is Dead at 82

NYT obit for Robin Lakoff

It should be said that LLMs also generally have on-par performance with traditional NMT engines (see arxiv.org/html/2401.05... or aclanthology.org/2024.wmt-1.1...); but apart from that, I guess the whole "novelty" thing makes it a preferred choice for people wanting to implement machine l10n.

Compared to traditional NMT engines, LLMs do have this advantage of easily allowing to provide requirements for the translation (in terms of style, keywords; see aclanthology.org/2023.wmt-1.8... or arxiv.org/abs/2301.13294); even though I highly doubt it's widely used for machine l10n.

@bsavoldi.bsky.social taking us back in time at #GITT2025 ⌚⏳ focusing on the first discussions of gender bias in language technology as a socio-technical issue. No, the problem hasn't been fixed yet. But what has happened?

hmm that's nice, but does ACL allow to change style files like that?

to quote a colleague quoting a goose: “alignment to what? alignment to what??”

I never said that you were against benchmarking; rather that, in my opinion, such datasets can be used as a starting point to theoretically define the "default behaviors" of LLMs insofar as they reflect what we generally expect from them on a diverse range of tasks.

To my knowledge, there is no research on the topic, but I intuitively believe that generic prompts are much more prevalent than one may first think. While many do, I don't think *most* people actually use already created prompt templates or necessarily have the time to describe their task at length.

I think that makes sense to draw on these benchmarks for research on LLM behaviors given they're the standard in evaluating LLMs.

So the "golden" default behavior for each task could theoretically be found in standard LLM benchmarking datasets (and same for "generic prompts").

Actually, I think we should talk about default behaviors (plural) where each default behavior is task-dependent. Main tasks can be determined from commonly used LLM benchmarks (that is, commonsense reasoning w/ ARC; language understanding/question-answer w/ OpenBookQA…).

vastai is the cheapest and the most reliable that I know

Ring Of Past (live) YouTube video by Men I Trust

MIT releasing new live sessions I can't
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTX4...

we've been laughing at so many of the twitter responses to this, its very funny

aaah! Well that's definitely an interesting question. Very curious to know the answer too lol. Theoretically I guess it's possible but the performance may not be very good

GitHub - ading2210/doompdf: A port of Doom (1993) that runs inside a PDF file A port of Doom (1993) that runs inside a PDF file. Contribute to ading2210/doompdf development by creating an account on GitHub.

It can: github.com/ading2210/do...

Is this even feasible or desirable? (I think it is.) And where to draw the line between inherently inappropriate content and disputed (but sound) content when doing pre-training filtering?

This is obviously not specific to China — DeepSeek shows an example of it, but it could apply to any other country — and not even to diplomatic topics in general. The larger questions (and perhaps debate) are: How to best promote the development of globally fair and accurate models?

"Open-source" generally implies more than just giving access to the code, though. Can an LLM really be called "open" if it purposely refuses to answer historical questions that may go against a certain political power's narrative? Or if it promotes the One China principle with propaganda?

DeepSeek is incredible evidence that the number of local, open-source LLMs will keep growing and that these models can achieve similar performance similar to proprietary models.

Is this even feasible or desirable? (I think it is.) And where to draw the line between inherently inappropriate content and disputed (but sound) content when doing pre-training filtering?

This is obviously not specific to China — DeepSeek shows an example of it, but it could apply to any other country — and not even to diplomatic topics in general. The larger questions (and perhaps debate) are: How to best promote the development of globally fair and accurate models?

"Open-source" generally implies more than just giving access to the code, though. Can an LLM really be called "open" if it purposely refuses to answer historical questions that may go against a certain political power's narrative? Or if it promotes the One China principle with propaganda?

DeepSeek is incredible evidence that the number of local, open-source LLMs will keep growing and that these models can achieve similar performance similar to proprietary models.

"Open-source" generally implies more than just giving access to the code, though. Can an LLM really be called "open" if it purposely refuses to answer historical questions that may go against a certain political power's narrative? Or promotes the One China principle with propaganda?

DeepSeek is incredible evidence that the number of local, open-source LLMs will keep growing and that these models can achieve similar performance similar to proprietary models.

My main take away of the Deepseek paper is not scientific but organizational: we need an European industrial plan in AI right now. No safety summit, no peppered compute grants, no funding processes that take two years.