Friday, August 15, 2025

8/15/25: DD on local LLMs; LM starting a book writing project

Artificial Intelligence Study Group

 Welcome! We meet from 4:00-4:45 p.m. Central Time on Fridays. Anyone can join. Feel free to attend any or all sessions, or ask to be removed from the invite list as we have no wish to send unneeded emails of which we all certainly get too many. 
Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu
Agenda & Minutes (174th meeting, Aug. 15, 2025)

Table of Contents
* Agenda and minutes
* Appendix: Transcript (when available)

Agenda and Minutes
  • Announcements, updates, questions, etc.
  • EG and DD are working on slides surveying different ML models.
  • VW will demo his wind tunnel system at some point. 
  • ES will provide a review of The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions, by Geoff Woods, when we request it.
  • "Join us for a thought-provoking lecture and book signing with renowned economist and King’s College London professor Daniel Susskind as part of the CBHHS Research Symposium."
    Thursday, September 4, 2:00 p.m., UA Little Rock, University Theatre – Campus conversation    
    Friday, September 5, 2:00 p.m., UA Little Rock, University Theatre – Campus and community conversation 

Susskind, a leading voice on the future of work and technology, will explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the workplace and how we can harness its potential to work smarter. Don’t miss this opportunity to engage with one of today’s most influential thinkers on AI, economics, and the future of our professions.

 Register to Attend


  • DD generously did an informal demo on local LLMs. Thanks!
  • Here are projects that MS students can sign up for. If anyone has an idea for an MS project where the student reports to us for a few minutes each week for discussion and feedback - a student might potentially be recruited! Let me know.
    • Book writing project
      • 8/15/2025: LG has signed up for this.
        • Topic of book will be: personal investing
        • Committee: DB, MM, RS; Y will apply for AGFS and then can be on the committee.
        • Does the Donaghey Scholars program have guidelines on report structure? IU suggests LG could contact Dr. S. Hawkins and/or Dr. J. Scott, who are involved in the program, to see if they have any such guidelines.
    • VW had some specific AI-related topics that need books about them.  
    • JH suggests a project in which AI is used to help students adjust their resumes to match key terms in job descriptions, to help their resumes bubble to the top when the many resumes are screened early in the hiring process.
    • JC suggested: social media are using AI to decide what to present to them, the notorious "algorithms." Suggestion: a social media cockpit from which users can say what sorts of things they want. Screen scrape the user's feeds from social media outputs to find the right stuff. Might overlap with COSMOS. Project could be adapted to either tech-savvy CS or application-oriented IS or IQ students.
    • DD suggests having a student do something related to Mark Windsor's presentation. He might like to be involved, but this would not be absolutely necessary.
      • markwindsorr@atlas-research.io writes on 7/14/2025:
        Our research PDF processing and text-to-notebook workflows are now in beta and ready for you to try.
        You can now:
        - Upload research papers (PDF) or paste in an arXiv link and get executable notebooks
        - Generate notebook workflows from text prompts
        - Run everything directly in our shared Jupyter environment
        This is an early beta, so expect some rough edges - but we're excited to get your feedback on what's working and what needs improvement.
        Best, Mark
        P.S. Found a bug or have suggestions? Hit reply - we read every response during beta.
        Log In Here: https://atlas-research.io
  • Any questions you'd like to bring up for discussion, just let me know.
  • Anyone read an article recently they can tell us about next time?
  • Any other updates or announcements?
  • Here is the latest on future readings and viewings. Let me know of anything you'd like to have us evaluate for a fuller reading, viewing or discussion.
  • 7/25/25: eval was 4.5 (over 4 people). https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html.
  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361. 5/30/25: eval was 4. 7/25/25: vote was 2.5.
  • We can evaluate https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10718663 for reading & discussion. 7/25/25: vote was 3.25 over 4 people.
  • Evaluation was 4.4 (6 people) on 8/8/25: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-refusals
  • Evaluation was 3.87 on 8/8/25 (6 people voted): https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-flips-the-script-on-ai-in-education-claude-learning-mode-makes-students-do-the-thinking
  • Evaluation was 3.5 by 6 people on 8/8/25: Put the following into an AI and interact - ask it to summarize, etc.: Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning  (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html); Bricken, T., Templeton, A., Batson, J., Chen, B., Jermyn, A., Conerly, T., Turner, N., Anil, C., Denison, C., Askell, A., Lasenby, R., Wu, Y., Kravec, S., Schiefer, N., Maxwell, T., Joseph, N., Hatfield-Dodds, Z., Tamkin, A., Nguyen, K., McLean, B., Burke, J.E., Hume, T., Carter, S., Henighan, T. and Olah, C., 2023. Transformer Circuits Thread.
  • Evaluation was 3.75 by 6 people on 8/8/25 for: Use the same process as above but on another article.
  • Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf. 
  • Https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2024/12/22/10-ai-predictions-for-2025/
  • Prompt engineering course:
    https://apps.cognitiveclass.ai/learning/course/course-v1:IBMSkillsNetwork+AI0117EN+v1/home. (Volunteer?)
  • Neural Networks, Deep Learning: The basics of neural networks, and the math behind how they learn, https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks. (We would need to pick a specific one later.)
  • LangChain free tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/@LangChain/videos. (The evaluation question is, do we investigate this any further?)
  • Chapter 6 recommends material by Andrej Karpathy, https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos for learning more. What is the evaluation question? "Someone should check into these and suggest something more specific"?
  • Chapter 6 recommends material by Chris Olah, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chris+olah
  • Chapter 6 recommended https://www.youtube.com/c/VCubingX for relevant material, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1il-s4mgNdI
  • Chapter 6 recommended Art of the Problem, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS90-FX6pg
  • LLMs and the singularity: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=ISHLLM&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FISHLLM.pdf (summarized at: https://poe.com/s/WuYyhuciNwlFuSR0SVEt). (Old eval from 6/7/24 was 4 3/7.)
  • Schedule back burner "when possible" items:
    • TE is in the informal campus faculty AI discussion group. 
    • SL: "I've been asked to lead the DCSTEM College AI Ad Hoc Committee. ... We’ll discuss AI’s role in our curriculum, how to integrate AI literacy into courses, and strategies for guiding students on responsible AI use."
    • Anyone read an article recently they can tell us about?
    • The campus has assigned a group to participate in the AAC&U AI Institute's activity "AI Pedagogy in the Curriculum." IU is on it and may be able to provide updates now and then. 
Appendix: Transcript
 
Artificial Intelligence Study Group

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