Summer is already coming to an end! A lot of new students are moving in to my dorm, and I start to feel the cheerful new semester vibe all over the campus! Here, I briefly reflect on how my summer went.

Travel: This summer, I traveled to Bay area, Paris, and Vienna, some of which were for attending conferences. Visiting Paris again in 6 years was very refreshing; Eiffel Tower was decorated with the Olympic rings; This year is also a 150-year anniversary of Impressionism, and Paris was the very place where the first-ever impressionist exhibition opened 150 years ago. I feel very lucky to visit Paris in this historic year. Vienna is a hometown of many famous musicians, including Beethoven, Mozart, and Johann Strauss. Mozart orchestra and the International Piano competition winners’ concert were fantastic. They inspired me to resume practicing piano, after a very long hiatus.

Research: I’m continuing research on mechanistic interpretability, an effort to understand LLMs (Large Language Models) better, and to ensure their safety. I learned a lot from the conferences I attended over the summer; This summer, Meta released a 405-billion parameter open-source LLM, and it went viral within the community. I believe this will further accelerate the research progress in the field. Regarding how we should approach interpretability research, I would like to cite Sam Marks’ talk from this year’s New England Mechanistic Interpretability workshop: Interpretability research should aim having practical consequences beyond just better understanding the model, e.g., providing guarantees of safety or improving model’s performance via better understanding of LLM’s reasoning process.

Miscellaneous: I took MIT sailing lessons, and went out to sailing a few times! I hope to pass the provisional rating test soon, so that I can take out fancier boats for sailing. I also got a chance to try indoor bouldering and top rope climbing for the first time. It was quite challenging, but also very exciting — I want to become better!

See you in the next post!