Sweet summer song by Uzay G. '26

Hey folks,

it’s been a while. I’ve been very focused and not in a writing mood for the last couple months, but I’m back and I’m excited to start cooking.

Yes; as the music changes, Like a prismatic glass, It takes the light and ranges Through all the moods that pass; Dissects the common carnival Of passions and regrets, And gives the world a glimpse of all The colours it forgets.

— Alfred Noyes, The Barrel Organ

This summer has been full of new colors. Last semester was not the best, and I’ve been rediscovering a lot of beauty which I wanted to share a glimpse of here.

I stayed in Boston for June-July and then traveled and saw family for August. I was continuing my research with the Isola lab on inner optimization in language models.

I met people and took in new media:

• I met a dude named Anton who is really into film and we watches some cool movies together. I really enjoyed Taste of Cherry by Kiarostami, although it’s a bit dark.

• I met a dude named Kai

• I went dancing a few times
  

• Watched the Alice in Borderlands show

Read some books!

• Read Anna Karenina, didn’t like it that much

• Slaughterhouse 5

• The art of loving, really enjoyed

Firelight

I run a club called Firelight dedicated to doing a bunch of random projects and learning activities. The goal is to make a community for students to get creative outside of classes and take time to learn together. We did a lot of stuff this summer, notably the Summer 2024 Learnathon. I sent out this email:

People got together, ran activities, learned together, and met weekly to check in. I enjoyed it a lot and might do something like this again in the future.

Personally I participated in the following:

• weekly movie night

• reading a quantum mechanics textbook (Shankar, would recommend)

• weekly systems reading group

People did a lot of other things! It was really fun.

Traveling

I traveled a lot this summer. I was in the US for a while and went around/visited friends, and then I saw family both in France and Turkey.

I began by visiting a friend in New York.

view from the jane street intern apartments terrace

We walked around a lot. We went central park and just loitered around a bunch of places, which is my favorite way of visiting a city. New York has something very pretty to it and I’d like to go there more. A few weeks later, I went to DC to visit another friend.

I had a voucher for this British airline for a cancelled flight, so I ended up going to Paris through London. This was a bit before the Olympics so it was very hectic, but I did a stop in Cambridge, UK to meet a friend there. The other Cambridge has this quaint town aesthetic ours doesn’t, and it was interesting to be there. It seems on average a bit more relaxed, but it was also summertime. The nature was pretty:

Then I somehow missed my flight from London to Paris (first time this happens), so I took an overnight bus to get home. The bus boards this ferry at 2 am and they give you food and then we crossed over into home territory. I arrived exhausted in Paris, and hung out with friends and went climbing a lot. I got cheap tickets to see the female lead boulder climbing competition!

Then, my large extended family (~25 ppl) all went to the mountains together. This is a tradition, as parts of my family are from these mountains in the Alps and we go there to hike and be together. Usually, almost everyday we do a hike, pack a picnic, swim in some cold lake at the middle of the hike, and then come down and make food for dinner. It was very pretty, and I feel very at peace in the mountains.

Then I saw the other side of my family in Turkey. I hadn’t been there in 5 years, and I worked on my turkish skills again and ate lots of great food. Turkish culture is warm and welcoming.

fun in the aegean sea

Here’s one of my nostalgic foods from going there as a child, these dough balls coated in syrup and cinnamon:

Research

I’ve been pretty focused on research this summer. MIT’s undergraduate research opportunities program (UROP) allows you to easily get paid for working in a lab. Copying over from my last post, since I’ve been working on this for a while:

I’m studying in-context learning, or the phenomenon where language models like ChatGPT, given sequences of the form x, f(x), x’, f(x’), … ie input-output examples of a function f in their prompt, can generalize and figure out the value of new inputs, ie predict f(x) from x.

In particular in-context learning is interesting because it underlies a lot of the reasoning ability of the best language models, and it’s still relatively poorly understood. It’s important because we want to know to what extent models learn complex inner search procedures/inner optimization goals, and we want to be careful about what those goals are. Developing a better theory for in context learning is also useful to describe model internals and make better optimization procedures.

This summer focusing solely on research was useful as I’ve been developing on a lot of random skills / localizing things I need to get better at:

• iterating quickly and derisking ideas rapidly

• being organized and clear in one’s communication, localizing the key ways people can help you and how to give them the information so that this can happen

• searching across the literature and trying to make conceptual progress on the things that matter.

• not getting too locally stressed about everything going perfectly / acknowledging that things take time and it’s ok, but that you should always be learning

I think navigating mentorship in ML can be a bit challenging though, because of how fast paced things go and how busy everyone is.

Once I wrap up this project, I want to take some time to think more broadly about what I want to work on.

What’s up next

I’ve been thinking about a lot of miscellaneous things, which I’ll try to blog about this semester as a teaser:

• my research aesthetics, what makes ML interesting and the kind of problems I want to solve

• narratives of strength? fostering narratives of mental strength and resolve can be super useful, and this summer channeled that energy for me, so I’d like to share more about it

• interpersonal relationships – relatedly, I’ve been thinking about navigating conflicts and expectations in any form of friendship. This is related to the question of strength and vulnerability: how much do you feel you can ask of someone? what makes that justified to you? how do these expectations get in the way of appreciating things for what they are? etc…

• the usual stuff about being scattered and figuring one’s life etc etc etc

Other than that, I’m looking forward to this semester (which is already a decent amount underway), in particular excited for:

• I’m taking 8.05 (Quantum Physics II), it’s been really cool
• I’m taking the intermediate poetry creative writing workshop at harvard
• fun 18.408, an algorithmist’s toolkit
• doing research stuff
• fun adventures with friends (I just ran a burrito party where everyone brought an ingredient and we made one huge burrito!)

Excited to be posting more from here on out, I’m trying to get my ML post out this following week.