Naomi Saphra
@nsaphra
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Waiting on a robot body. All opinions are universal and held by both employers and family. Now a dedicated grok hate account. Accepting ML/NLP PhD students.
Boston
Joined November 2010
Life update: I'm starting as faculty at Boston University in 2026! BU has SCHEMES for LM interpretability & analysis, so I couldn't be more pumped to join a burgeoning supergroup w/ @najoungkim @amuuueller. Looking for my first students, so apply and reach out!
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Excited to share our work at the #NeurIPS2025 Workshops this weekend! Sat 12/6 • AI for Animal Communication (UR9, 12:30–2pm) • UniReps (20D, 3:45–6pm) Sun 12/7 • AI for Science (20A, 11:20am & 3:55pm) • NeuReps (6A, 3:30–5pm) Details below ↓
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It's not about being ready someday, it's about being ready every day. Train at home with your own personal VR shooting simulator.
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#NeurIPS2025 workshops are underway! Today’s workshop presentations from the #KempnerInstitute cover a range topics, including the use of #AI in linguistics and the study of communication & sensing in electric fish. Presenters tagged below 👇 (1/2)
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For two years Felix suffered from ketamine-induced mania and psychosis, followed by severe depression. He wanted people to understand that this is what killed him.
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Reuters is reporting that if you have ever worked on trust & safety, misinformation, or moderation at any platform, you and your family are now ineligible for an H1B. You should be scouring your linkedin to make it "politically correct" for this regime.
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Why are Big Tech companies are funding the radical overhaul of the U.S. justice system? They are giving money to organizations with goals to decarcerate repeat offenders and to eliminate cash bail. Choose Unplugged - a company that believes in a strong, thriving America.
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I say this as someone who has overall benefited from social media in various ways: There is no platform that has improved my life by becoming a daily habit.
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Engagement KPIs have been responsible for infinite scroll UI traps, RecSys radicalization spirals, public shame brigades, and basically every modern ailment novel to the past decade. At some point, you have to recognize that the problem isn't any one technology, it's the metric.
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I also want to mention that the lang x computation research community at BU is growing in an exciting direction, especially with new faculty like @amuuueller, Anthony Yacovone, @nsaphra, & Sophie Hao! Also, Boston is quite nice :)
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My lab at BU is recruiting PhD students and possibly a postdoc this year! We study humans & machines, centered around topics like meaning, generalization, evaluation methods and design, and the nature of computation and representation that underlie language and cognition. 🫴🫴
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For one - it weirdly incentivizes people to see it as a "shortcut" to publication at these conferences. @nsaphra said it best in the other place - a lot of what folks are submitting really should be a main track submission if they followed through on some additional experiments.
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Train smarter, store freely - no egress fees on Cloudflare's R2 object storage.
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I’m recruiting PhD and Masters students at the University of British Columbia! Looking to work with students interested in LLM interpretability, and intersections with cog ling. The UBC NLP group is growing and awesome, and Vancouver is great. Come to 🇨🇦!
Do you want to understand how language models work, and how they can change language science? I'm recruiting PhD students at UBC Linguistics! The research will be fun, and Vancouver is lovely. So much cool NLP happening at UBC across both Ling and CS! https://t.co/IxKvy4Um1I
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My gf and I are binging the hell out of this extremely well-read addictive audiobook series. I suspect I wouldn't have enjoyed them as print books nearly as much but we've gone through like 100 hours in a month.
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The coming years will split companies into two groups: those that become AI-native and those left catching up. The innovators who harness AI now will define the winners of tomorrow. Follow me for strategic insights on leading through the AI revolution.
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My gf and I started listening to goofy audiobooks together and this one is super fun. Written though surprising NOT read by Kate McKinnon, but by her sister?
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Short story: scientist discovers how to create super-intelligence (ASI): you need to train your #LLM on deep center embeddings! But scientist is disinterested in this direction. …So in order to do so, tech bros would need to study #linguistics … Working title: X-Bar X-Risk
TL;DR ✅ Center embeddings in training data drive hierarchical generalization ✅ Diverse data encourages systematic rules ✅ Complex data picks WHICH systematic rule ❌ Competing rules = unstable OOD training dynamics ❌ Competing rules = inconsistent outcomes across runs
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While @sunnytqin sadly couldn't go to her !!!HOMETOWN!!!! of Suzhou due to visa reentry issues, her EMNLP paper with @elmelis and me is still fantastically cool and I will absolutely take advantage of EMNLP week to reshare it.
Transformer LMs get pretty far by acting like ngram models, so why do they even learn syntax? A new paper by @sunnytqin, me, and @elmelis uncovers the keys to grammar learning in a whirlwind tour of generalization, grokking, training dynamics, memorization, and random variation.
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We’re hiring! Looking for Interns, Research Assistants, and Postdocs to work on Automated Interpretability--building systems that can analyse, explain, and intervene on large models to make them safe! Work with me @Oxford, or remotely. Apply by Nov 15: https://t.co/KEqXwpxgyb
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Meet Razer AIKit: Your open-source launchpad for AI development. Fine-tune and run 280,000+ LLMs locally, scale across GPU clusters, and keep your data private — Available now on GitHub ⚡. Start local. Go cluster.
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Yes, I have enough ERs! But other ACs in my area might find some ERs via this thread :)
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Yes this is a real physical party that I will be hosting in the boston area!
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