Vivek Srikumar

New post on named neurons: how mapping neural network elements to symbolic
logic gives us the vocabulary to reason about what networks do.

svivek.com/writing/2026...

After I shared “How to professor” last year, some people asked for a similar post on writing. Now I finally got around to typing up our lab's writing workshop slides.
It covers basic advice for research papers and grant applications.
Curious? Read it here: dirkhovy.com/post/2025_11...

After about a decade, I finally updated my website. And also decided to start a blog.

First post: How long will an ancient hominid take to read a modern pre-training corpus?

Answer: 5.7 million years.

svivek.com/writing/2025...

Honestly it's happening so much that I can't keep up with adding all of them to our tracker. I have ~30 cases that people have sent my way that I'm still ingesting, so will be over 100 soon.

www.polarislab.org/ai-law-track...

Book Review: The Great Gatsby by the Xerox 914 Photocopier Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, technophobes and Luddites have continued to insist that machines “can’t really write”—at least not the wa...

"This is an achievement that took Fitzgerald himself around two stressful years—and the faster writing time offers proof that the Xerox 914, via its use of electricity, bright light, and powdered toner, has exceeded the creative powers of the human mind."

Trying something new:
A 🧵 on a topic I find many students struggle with: "why do their 📊 look more professional than my 📊?"

It's *lots* of tiny decisions that aren't the defaults in many libraries, so let's break down 1 simple graph by @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social

🔗 www.ft.com/content/73a1...

Doing good science is 90% finding a science buddy to constantly talk to about the project.

EMNLP 2025

The metaphors of artificial intelligence A few months after ChatGPT was released, the neural network pioneer Terrence Sejnowski wrote about coming to grips with the shock of what large language models (LLMs) could do: “Something is beginning...

For Science Magazine, I wrote about "The Metaphors of Artificial Intelligence".

The way you conceptualize AI systems affects how you interact with them, do science on them, and create policy and apply laws to them.

Hope you will check it out!

www.science.org/doi/full/10....