Your PhD Application, Seen from the Other Side
A few years ago I was the applicant. Now I read the applications. Here is what actually carries information for me, what carries none, and what quietly works against you.
A few years ago I was the applicant. Now I read the applications. Here is what actually carries information for me, what carries none, and what quietly works against you.
Intellectual independence and a refusal to leave important things as black boxes: two things I hope my students carry into their research.
A Turing-complete Transformer inherits Kleene-style self-reference, but the self it refers to is the prompt, not the weights. Notes on what that does and does not say about recursive self-improvement.
Kleene’s recursion theorem, the Y combinator, and a contraction mapping all give you x = f(x). They answer different questions, and it helps to keep them apart before talking about self-improving AI.
The students who get the most out of me are doing something that looks a lot like prompt engineering — whether or not they would describe it that way.