William Merrill
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lambdaviking.bsky.social
William Merrill
@lambdaviking.bsky.social
Will irl - PhD student @ NYU on the academic job market!

Using complexity theory and formal languages to understand the power and limits of LLMs

https://lambdaviking.com/ https://github.com/viking-sudo-rm
Pinned
A starter pack for research on Formal Languages and Neural Networks!

go.bsky.app/eKG7Ua
I'll be defending my dissertation at NYU next Monday, June 16 at 4pm ET!

I've definitely missed inviting some people who might be interested, so please email me if you'd like to attend (NYC or Zoom)
June 9, 2025 at 9:24 PM
Reposted by William Merrill
As we’ve been working towards training a new version of OLMo, we wanted to improve our methods for measuring the Critical Batch Size (CBS) of a training run, to unlock greater efficiency. but we found gaps between the methods in the literature and our practical needs for training OLMo. 🧵
June 3, 2025 at 4:43 PM
✨How does the depth of a transformer affect its reasoning capabilities? New preprint by myself and @Ashish_S_AI shows that a little depth goes a long way to increase transformers’ expressive power

We take this as encouraging for further research on looped transformers!🧵
March 7, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by William Merrill
Wow, authors' copies have just arrived! So cool (and kinda strange lol) to see our work in print!
Amazing job from @commonnotions.bsky.social! Love the cover design from Josh MacPhee <3

Get a copy here:
www.commonnotions.org/why-we-fear-ai
February 15, 2025 at 9:08 PM
Reposted by William Merrill
Excited to announce that the (stellar!) program for NASSLLI is out now: nasslli25.shane.st

Further details on registration and whatnot to follow in the coming weeks. Please do circulate to anyone you know who may be interested in attending!
North American Summer School on Logic, Language and Information (NASSLLI '25) @ UW
Official website for the North American Summer School for Logic, Language and Information, taking place June 23-27 at the Univeristy of Washington, Seattle.
nasslli25.shane.st
February 11, 2025 at 10:16 PM
Reposted by William Merrill
This is a call to action. The vast majority of us are furious that our constitution is being blatantly violated at the highest levels of government. Here’s a simple way to use your voice - all you need is tape and access to a printer:
February 8, 2025 at 6:56 PM
eruditio olmonis est omnis divisa in partes tres: praeeruditionem, eruditionem seram, et posteruditionem
hearing reports from r/localLlama that OLMo 2 is decent at latin?… love that it’s the first thing someone thought to try
November 28, 2024 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by William Merrill
hearing reports from r/localLlama that OLMo 2 is decent at latin?… love that it’s the first thing someone thought to try
November 28, 2024 at 4:26 AM
Reposted by William Merrill
Meet OLMo 2, the best fully open language model to date, including a family of 7B and 13B models trained up to 5T tokens. OLMo 2 outperforms other fully open models and competes with open-weight models like Llama 3.1 8B — As always, we released our data, code, recipes and more 🎁
November 26, 2024 at 8:51 PM
A starter pack for research on Formal Languages and Neural Networks!

go.bsky.app/eKG7Ua
November 26, 2024 at 4:02 PM
This is actually really cool! I used it today to surface results on a topic I’ve been curious about for a while but where conventional search failed (the complexity of the word problem for finitely generated monoids)

www.semanticscholar.org/paper/On-the...
November 20, 2024 at 4:28 AM