The Gradient is an organization with the missions of making it easier for anyone to learn about AI and of facilitating discu. We were founded in 2017 by a group of students and researchers at the Stanford AI Lab. Our current projects include The Gradient Magazine, The Gradient Podcast, The Update newsletter, and Sigmoid Social. We are a non-profit and volunteer-run effort run by researchers and engineers in the AI community.
Don't feel you fully understand Mastodon?
Check out "An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon"! by @noelle
It's extremely thorough, and if it still doesn't answer a question it's on Github, so you can submit an issue request to clarify!
Got around to adding some custom emojis to Sigmoid Social! 
https://emojos.in/sigmoid.social?show_animated=true
This is a somewhat random set I (@andrey) felt like adding. Feel free to suggest additional ones! 
Fun fact! If you go to our profile directory (https://sigmoid.social/directory) you can easily find people from Sigmoid Social to follow. The link to it is in the bottom left of the web UI next to 'Invite people'.
Some links to make it easy to subscribe to AI-related hashtags! (just click on the little + button on the top right)
https://sigmoid.social/tags/PaperThread
https://sigmoid.social/tags/NewPaper
https://sigmoid.social/tags/RL
https://sigmoid.social/tags/CV
https://sigmoid.social/tags/NLProc
https://sigmoid.social/tags/aiart
Feel free to suggest/link to other hashtags in replies :) 
Hello Sigmoid Social users!
Wow, Sigmoid Social has been around for over 2.5 years now, how time flies...
Just want mention we are very much still around as administrators and moderators of this Mastodon instance behind the scenes.
We appear to have reached a steady-state of a decent number of users, and we love that some of you still benefit from this instance.
Please do message or email us if you want to suggest improvements or changes!
PSA: We've been seeing an uptick of spam coming from various Mastodon instances over the last several weeks. To address this, we are suspending federation with the instances that appear to be the source of spam; these are generally small instances that don't presently have interactions with users on here. Our instance still has approval-gated registration, so no spam accounts are expected to be created on here.
FYI: we currently have no plans to in any way limit interaction with Threads on this instance. Some major AI voices (eg Karpathy, LeCun) are active on there, so we believe this in the best interest of the community. However, if Sigmoid Social users urge us to act otherwise, we'd be happy to put it to a vote.
(context: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon )
Oops, we haven't posted anything in quite a while... Hi! Though we've been silent, be assured that behind the scenes we at The Gradient are continuing to actively admin and moderate Sigmoid Social. Our stats show steady user activity for a while now, so we are happy many of you decided to stick around and keep posting here 
Happy almost holidays 
This paper was also covered by @thegradient in a recent update:
Fun fact for long-time Sigmoiders - we've seen more users joining lately, and the active users has generally stabilized at 2k+ users for a while now.
Thank you all for being part of this lovely place :)
Super pumped that @thegradient has published "Interpretability Creationism", my manifesto for considering the training process in AI interpretability research!
We have seen an uptick in crypto spam in the last couple of days. As this is coming from other Mastodon instances there is not much we can do except suspend the account as they are reported, as we do not want to block federation entirely with these instances. Hopefully this willl get resolved soon!
Just joined sigmoid.social. Thank you to @thegradient for setting up this instance. :-) #Introduction : I’m interested in AI, esp interpretability, safety, and reasoning. I’m trans, non-binary, queer, poly, and kinky. I’ve worked in AI since 2020 (at OpenAI). Before that, software eng and site reliability for 20ish years. I love SciFI, karaoke, and beer. I care a lot about politics and human rights. I try to always learn open-heartedly from people who are different from me.
An update: we've seen persistent almost-daily spam keep popping up, so given that + the poll result, we have changed Sigmoid to be approval-gated for sign ups.
The criteria are very simple: we require a reasonable sounding answer to "why do you want to sign up", and nothing else.
Hopefully Mastodon adds better spam detection tools this year!
Sigmoid Social is 6 months old! 
Thank you to all of you for making this a lovely community
The vote on whether to make registration approve-only was very close! For now we will try to just keep a close eye on reports and shut down any SPAM asap. If the volume of spam increases to the point that there are multiple new spam accounts per day, we will then lock things down more.
We've been seeing an uptick in new accounts spamming ads over the past week or so :(
We've opted to keep this instance free for anyone to register without approval, but this may merit a change to that policy.
What do you think?
If we opt for approval, we will just let anyone join who expresses interest in AI.
If we do keep registration open, we rely on all of you to report any spam you see!
How's everyone enjoying their time on Sigmoid Social these days?
We've been in slow decline in active users, but it's still at 3.1k so this place is certainly still alive :)
Let us know if we can do anything to improve your experience in here!
(except for latex/markdown support, that's sadly not really doable)
It has now been one year since Russia began it's war against Ukraine.
New podcast from @thegradient with Hattie Zhou (twitter: https://twitter.com/oh_that_hat):
`Lottery Tickets and Algorithmic Reasoning in LLMs`
https://thegradientpub.substack.com/p/hattie-zhou-lottery-tickets-and-algorithmic
The first half is focused on the lottery ticket hypothesis, which is a favorite topic of mine.
How did Neural Machine Translation evolve over time, how did attention impact NLP, and what does it mean to do good science? @db7894 speaks with Professor Kyunghyun Cho @kchonyc in our latest: https://thegradientpub.substack.com/p/kyunghyun-cho-neural-machine-translation#details
Quick poll: would you be interested in us setting up a Sigmoid Social forum or subreddit for longer-form persistent discussions?
Last, but not least, was an entry that received a lot of votes, but wasn't computer generated!
Thanks to @Bebischof for this piece!
