The Gradient

@[email protected]
6.4K Followers
154 Following
335 Posts
The Gradient is an organization with the missions of making it easier for anyone to learn about AI and of facilitating discu. We were founded in 2017 by a group of students and researchers at the Stanford AI Lab. Our current projects include The Gradient Magazine, The Gradient Podcast, The Update newsletter, and Sigmoid Social. We are a non-profit and volunteer-run effort run by researchers and engineers in the AI community.
Websitehttps://thegradient.pub/about
Newsletterhttps://thegradientpub.substack.com/s/the-update
Podcasthttps://thegradientpub.substack.com/s/podcast
The GradientJul 1, 2024

Hello Sigmoid Social users!

Wow, Sigmoid Social has been around for over 2.5 years now, how time flies...

Just want mention we are very much still around as administrators and moderators of this Mastodon instance behind the scenes.

We appear to have reached a steady-state of a decent number of users, and we love that some of you still benefit from this instance.

Please do message or email us if you want to suggest improvements or changes!

 

The GradientFeb 28, 2024
PSA: We've been seeing an uptick of spam coming from various Mastodon instances over the last several weeks. To address this, we are suspending federation with the instances that appear to be the source of spam; these are generally small instances that don't presently have interactions with users on here. Our instance still has approval-gated registration, so no spam accounts are expected to be created on here.
The GradientDec 17, 2023

FYI: we currently have no plans to in any way limit interaction with Threads on this instance. Some major AI voices (eg Karpathy, LeCun) are active on there, so we believe this in the best interest of the community. However, if Sigmoid Social users urge us to act otherwise, we'd be happy to put it to a vote.

(context: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon )

Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration

Mark Zuckerberg said Threads is testing ActivityPub support that will make its posts available on Mastodon and other interoperable services.

The Verge
The GradientDec 15, 2023

Oops, we haven't posted anything in quite a while... Hi! Though we've been silent, be assured that behind the scenes we at The Gradient are continuing to actively admin and moderate Sigmoid Social. Our stats show steady user activity for a while now, so we are happy many of you decided to stick around and keep posting here šŸ˜Š

Happy almost holidays šŸŽ„

The GradientSep 12, 2023
Show threadmarcoSep 11, 2023

This paper was also covered by @thegradient in a recent update:

https://thegradientpub.substack.com/i/136507314/research-highlight-faith-and-fate-limits-of-transformers-on-compositionality

Update #57: AI Powers Accessibility Tech and Faith & Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality

AI systems empower paralyzed people to speak and walk again; researchers probe fundamental limitations in transformer-based language models' ability to solve compositional problems.

The Gradient
The GradientJul 30, 2023

Fun fact for long-time Sigmoiders - we've seen more users joining lately, and the active users has generally stabilized at 2k+ users for a while now.

Thank you all for being part of this lovely place :)

The GradientJul 11, 2023
Naomi SaphraJul 11, 2023

Super pumped that @thegradient has published "Interpretability Creationism", my manifesto for considering the training process in AI interpretability research!

https://thegradient.pub/interpretability-creationism

Interpretability Creationism

On ā€œinterpretability creationismā€ ā€“ interpretability methods that only look at the final state of the model and ignore its evolution over the course of training

The Gradient
The GradientMay 18, 2023
We have seen an uptick in crypto spam in the last couple of days. As this is coming from other Mastodon instances there is not much we can do except suspend the account as they are reported, as we do not want to block federation entirely with these instances. Hopefully this willl get resolved soon!
The GradientMay 8, 2023
Alethea PowerNov 5, 2022
Just joined sigmoid.social. Thank you to @thegradient for setting up this instance. :-)ā€©#Introduction : Iā€™m interested in AI, esp interpretability, safety, and reasoning. Iā€™m trans, non-binary, queer, poly, and kinky. Iā€™ve worked in AI since 2020 (at OpenAI). Before that, software eng and site reliability for 20ish years. I love SciFI, karaoke, and beer. I care a lot about politics and human rights. I try to always learn open-heartedly from people who are different from me.
Show threadThe GradientMay 8, 2023

An update: we've seen persistent almost-daily spam keep popping up, so given that + the poll result, we have changed Sigmoid to be approval-gated for sign ups.

The criteria are very simple: we require a reasonable sounding answer to "why do you want to sign up", and nothing else.

Hopefully Mastodon adds better spam detection tools this year!