Friday, January 23, 2026

1/23/26: Welcome back! DR leads discussion on his website and activities

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 & Status (191st meeting, Jan. 23, 2026)

Agenda and Minutes
  • Announcements
    • Welcome back!
  • Today 
    • DR discussed his activities and website:
      • Site: https://www.thecenterforethicalai.com.
      • We read the first page of chapter 1 in his ebook Ethical AI Integration.
  • Next time: readings from DD's recent conference paper.
  • Future plans
    • Read a couple paragraphs and decide if we should read it in detail: LLMs Are Randomized Algorithms (https://share.google/sLYorUX7Mz4KQBxxH)
    • Check a couple minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNF0FvRjGZk to see if we should view it in detail.
    • What if we read from papers authored by people in this group? Then an author would be present to help everyone understand it.
      • AB has a paper under revision.
      • DR has a paper just published.
    • Similarly: Invite paper authors at UALR or anywhere to host a reading session on the abstract and various paragraphs of a paper they published or plan to submit. 
  • Updates
    • DD. Research status?
    • Anyone else?  
  • Other 
    • Any discussion questions you'd like to hear input on? Let me know.
    • Anyone read an article recently they can tell us about next time?
    • Any other updates or announcements?
  • Readings/viewings for discussion. 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. 
    • Not evaluated yet
      • https://youtu.be/UclrVWafRAI?si=7y_OAvKlr8kM9lbc (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/BFU1OCkhBwo?si=KnHNuedfNaTkZzwp (VK)
      • https://youtu.be/x4ZY25OU4Ys?si=K1xp4uA14vBdCgOI (VK)
      • https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21622
      • Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning  (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html); Bricken, T., et al., 2023. Transformer Circuits Thread.
      • 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.)
        • We checked the first one briefly. 8/22/25: eval was 3.625 (from 4 people) for a full viewing.
        • Let's evaluate a few more of them.
      • 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.)
    •  Evaluated
      • 7/25/25: eval was 4.5 (over 4 people). https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html.
      • Evaluation was 4.4 (6 people) on 8/8/25: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-refusals
      • 8/22/25: eval. was 4.0 (4 people): Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf. 
      • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361. 5/30/25: eval was 4.0. 7/25/25: vote was 2.5.
      • 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
      • (Eval 8/29/25 was 3.75 over 5 people.) Https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NeNmKlAmJdf50ST7plw4mvgeeS7UJuYLyEQMz8slCA0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hnzmulgvk3qx.  
      • 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.
  • Back burner "when possible" items:
    • 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."
  • Any 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.
    • Please suggest a project!  
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