Gabriel Nicholas
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gaben.bsky.social
Gabriel Nicholas
@gaben.bsky.social
Writing about tech policy. Senior Policy Advisor at NTIA, research at Center for Democracy & Technology.
What an amazing paper! Definitely complicates the idea of what it means for LLMs to “parrot” their training data.
How do LLMs learn to reason from data? Are they ~retrieving the answers from parametric knowledge🦜? In our new preprint, we look at the pretraining data and find evidence against this:

Procedural knowledge in pretraining drives LLM reasoning ⚙️🔢

🧵⬇️
December 1, 2024 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by Gabriel Nicholas
I have a new report out w. @cendemtech.bsky.social looking at the latest in automated content moderation for the live-streaming context. Live video is hard to analyze, and - importantly - can’t be hashed and matched to existing infrastructures eg for CSAM detection. How are companies responding?
November 25, 2024 at 1:35 PM
Reposted by Gabriel Nicholas
Proud of this piece with @cmorten.bsky.social and @gaben.bsky.social —thanks for the review Emily! As social media researchers face more hostility from the industry, it’s useful to look at how we’ve secured independent research against powerful industry interests before
Delighted to see my recent paper with @gaben.bsky.social & @salome.bsky.social highlighted in the Regulatory Review!
Researcher Access to Social Media Data: Lessons from Clinical Trial Data Sharing, 38 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 109 (2024)
Thanks to author Emily Wen!
www.theregreview.org/2024/11/26/w...
Navigating the Challenges of Publicizing Social Media Data | The Regulatory Review
Scholars argue that data-sharing lessons from clinical trials can apply to social media.
www.theregreview.org
November 27, 2024 at 2:38 PM
Reposted by Gabriel Nicholas
Delighted to see my recent paper with @gaben.bsky.social & @salome.bsky.social highlighted in the Regulatory Review!
Researcher Access to Social Media Data: Lessons from Clinical Trial Data Sharing, 38 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 109 (2024)
Thanks to author Emily Wen!
www.theregreview.org/2024/11/26/w...
Navigating the Challenges of Publicizing Social Media Data | The Regulatory Review
Scholars argue that data-sharing lessons from clinical trials can apply to social media.
www.theregreview.org
November 27, 2024 at 2:22 PM
Reposted by Gabriel Nicholas
New from me: Two influencers make very similar content promoting Amazon products. They dress the same. They buy the same stuff. They even have a similar tattoo.

Now one is suing the other, claiming her rival won't stop copying her. But who influenced whom? www.theverge.com/2024/11/26/2...
The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry
Behind the scenes of a court battle for the “clean girl” look.
www.theverge.com
November 26, 2024 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by Gabriel Nicholas
I'm having a stroke. You guys gotta read this. Please.
He Bungled the Literary Scoop of the Year. Now He’s Ready to Explain Himself.
An interview with the Vanity Fair writer whose astounding revelations about Cormac McCarthy went viral for all the wrong reasons.
slate.com
November 23, 2024 at 1:38 AM
A lot of tech policy folks here talking about what a new administration means for AI and the internet, but are weirdly silent on what it means for 4DX movies.

Will a Carr FCC mean more seat vibration or more air blowing? Could a Trump executive order repeal the use of scents?
November 18, 2024 at 8:59 PM
Reposted by Gabriel Nicholas
[noticing a group of people having a nice time at the park] enjoy your echo chamber
November 18, 2024 at 4:03 AM
Reposted by Gabriel Nicholas
This is the only tweet screenshot I have saved, because it’s such a good encapsulation of the problem with saying that facials should just be “debated “:
December 23, 2023 at 1:19 PM
Wow so excited to be here so I can skeet my personal brand to an untimely death.
May 12, 2023 at 11:44 PM