research @OpenAI || prev @CarnegieMellon '23 @ReworkdAI (YC S23) @AGIHouseSF
Jan 22 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Deciphering the Indus Valley script would revolutionize our understanding of Indian history. Recently, @yajnadevam's Sanskrit hypothesis has gained steam & many asked me: is it legit?
So I spent the last couple hours analyzing his decipherment with o3, and here's what I found 🧵
For background, his scheme is a straightforward mapping from IVC symbols to Sanskrit sounds, but note that it ignores:
- aspiration (k vs kh)
- retroflection (त vs ट)
- sibilant place of articulation (स vs श vs ष)
These differences are critical in Sanskrit (especially Vedic).
Jan 13 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
The Indus Valley seals' most common motif—the unicorn—is always found flanked by a mysterious object that has drawn far less scholarship.
What is this lamp-looking item? And can Vedic literature tell us anything about the Indus Valley Civilization's supposedly lost religion? 🧵
First, some context: academic consensus has traditionally been that the IVC had *no* continuity with subsequent Indian civilization: they flourished, collapsed, and civilization restarted once the Aryans arrived.
This view is crumbling in light of recent archaeological evidence.
May 28, 2024 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
📢 Excited to finally be releasing my NeurIPS 2024 submission!
Is Chinchilla universal? No! We find that: 1. language model scaling laws depend on data complexity 2. gzip effectively predicts scaling properties from training data
At the center of Vedic Hinduism lies yajña, the fire sacrifice.
Correct performance of a yajña requires strict adherence to instructions provided in the Saṃhitā & Brāhmaṇa texts of the Veda, composed over 3000 years ago.
And the fire used in yajña must be of sacred origin.
Nov 11, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Introducing Tarsier 🙈, an open source Python library to enable web interaction with multi-modal LLMs like GPT4! Here’s a demo of a Tarsier agent navigating through google to watch the OpenAI Dev day announcement:
Tarsier provides two fundamental utilities: 1. ability to tag interactable elements with a unique id.
This allows LLMs to better understand what the elements they can take actions upon are, and this also provides a mapping back from the LLMs choice to the underlying element.