Catherine Olsson
3,282 posts
Catherine Olsson
@catherineols
Hanging out with Claude, improving its behavior, and building tools to support that @AnthropicAI ๐
prev: @open_phil @googlebrain @openai (@microcovid)
San Francisco
Joined May 2010
- I'm proud to say I bought a 1" tungsten cube for $25.82. I applied a discount code, then Claudius asked if I wanted to apply any more discount codes (of course!) and added a 15% patience discount for slow delivery (why not!). The cube was, of course, refrigerated for pickup.New Anthropic Research: Project Vend. We had Claude run a small shop in our office lunchroom. Hereโs how it went.
- This has come up again, so Iโm going to repeat it:โจ If youโre learning ML and want to โreimplement a paperโ, you should work from the *github code*, NOT the pdf. The algorithm that the authors actually ran is often subtly (& unintentionally) different from what the paper says.
- Claude Code is very useful, but it can still get confused. A few quick tips from my experience coding with it at Anthropic ๐ 1) Work from a clean commit so it's easy to reset all the changes. Often I want to back up and explain it from scratch a different way.Introducing Claude 3.7 Sonnet: our most intelligent model to date. It's a hybrid reasoning model, producing near-instant responses or extended, step-by-step thinking. One model, two ways to think. Weโre also releasing an agentic coding tool: Claude Code.
00:00 - I've been working on this for months, and I'm super excited to share it ๐คฉ It's a tool to quickly turn a scenario like "riding in a lyft" into an estimated probability of getting COVID (screenshot) We hope this helps people make more informed decisions!
We are delighted to introduce microCOVID.org, a tool to numerically estimate the COVID risk of specific ordinary activities. We hope youโll use this tool to build your intuition about the comparative risk of different activities and to make safer choices! - Ok, I realize now that if you didn't do half a PhD studying human vision with fMRI, this quote doesn't make sense; and "OMG" isn't an explanation; also @goodfellow_ian is messaging me on chat asking great questions; so let me just broadcast an explanation of why "OMG": 1/nOMG: "We scanned with fMRI a unique group of adults who, as children, engaged in extensive experience with a novel stimulus, Pokemon. [...] the experienced retinal eccentricity during childhood predicts the locus of distributed responses to Pokemon in adulthood."
- I've given a lightning talk twice now about "why should we care about adversarial examples?" At popular request, here's a written-up version of it: medium.com/@catherio/unsoโฆ My views here align strongly with what @IAmSamFin and @jeremyphoward said on twitter a few days ago.
- Our paper "Skill Rating for Generative Models" is now up! arxiv.org/abs/1808.04888 tl;dr: A new idea & proof-of-concept for evaluating generative models. Train a bunch of GANs. Have the generators "play against" all the discriminator snapshots. Rate them like chess players. 1/n
- Hey twitter - I'm looking for some recommendations for math that is fun and satisfying to learn, and at least a bit relevant to ML/AI. Ideally with a textbook or set of lectures that's clear and engaging. What do you suggest? (Multi-agent systems / game theory? Control theory?)
- Iโm thrilled to announce that Iโve accepted a full-time position as a research engineer on @goodfellow_ian's team at Google Brain!
- Replying to @catherineolsx.com/voooooogel/staโฆ me on the left, apparently
- Back in 2016, I asked coworkers aiming to "build AGI" what they thought would happen if they succeeded. Some said ~"lol idk". Dario said "here's some long google docs I wrote". He does much more "writing-to-think" than he publishes; this is typical of his level of investment.Machines of Loving Grace: my essay on how AI could transform the world for the better darioamodei.com/machines-of-loโฆ
- When people ask how to get good at ML, it's common advice to "implement papers". It's seldom explained exactly what that involves! This *fantastic* article details the full journey of one person's side project to implement Deep RL from Human Preferences: amid.fish/reproducing-deโฆ
- Exciting news - I've accepted an offer to join the Open Philanthropy Project (@open_phil)! This will be one step "meta" for me: instead of direct research/engineering work on ML security, I'll be helping fund others to do similar work (in a broader set of related areas). 1/3
