Trevor Chow

I think about AGI - if you do too, I’d love to meet you!

I’ve worked on browser agents at Moonglow, test time methods at Hazy Research and vol trading at Optiver.

I did half of my undergrad at Stanford and half at Cambridge. When I was younger, I was a King’s Scholar and competed in the UK maths and debating circuits.

Outside work, I split my time between ski slopes, skydiving dropzones and the Eras Tour.

Essays

From Apples to Strawberries

ChatGPT was a big deal, but o1 is a bigger deal. It marks the start of the "search" paradigm for LLMs.

Three Kuhnian Revolutions in ML Training

The science of pretraining LLMs has faced three Kuhnian revolutions in the last 4 years. The dominant theme is the growing importance of data.

The Vanguard of the Revolution

Index funds are socialism, in the best and worst sense.

This Time isn't Different

The anatomy of the 2022 crypto crash mirrors the 2008 financial crisis, involving an unmet demand for safe assets and an accompanying shadow banking system.

Storytelling in Kennywood Park

Monetary policy works in practice, not in theory. We don't understand its exact mechanisms, even as we can see its effects.

Line Goes Up

Economic growth is the phenomenon that underwrites all other value, but it is fragile and not an inevitability.

From Apples to Strawberries

ChatGPT was a big deal, but o1 is a bigger deal. It marks the start of the "search" paradigm for LLMs.

Three Kuhnian Revolutions in ML Training

The science of pretraining LLMs has faced three Kuhnian revolutions in the last 4 years. The dominant theme is the growing importance of data.

The Vanguard of the Revolution

Index funds are socialism, in the best and worst sense.

This Time isn't Different

The anatomy of the 2022 crypto crash mirrors the 2008 financial crisis, involving an unmet demand for safe assets and an accompanying shadow banking system.

Storytelling in Kennywood Park

Monetary policy works in practice, not in theory. We don't understand its exact mechanisms, even as we can see its effects.

Line Goes Up

Economic growth is the phenomenon that underwrites all other value, but it is fragile and not an inevitability.

Research

Smoothie: Label Free Language Model Routing

LLM routing scores can be learned without labelled data using a weak-supervision-inspired technique. Accepted to NeurIPS ‘24. Blog post here. Code here.

What Causes Polysemanticity?

Polsemanticity can arise incidentally, due to regularisation pressures and random noise during training. Accepted to BGPT & Re-Align @ ICLR ‘24. Blog post here. Code here.

Explainable Detection of Online Sexism

Fine-tuned BERT models can provide explainable classification of sexist text. Accepted to SemEval @ ACL ‘23.

Randomised Serial Dictatorship with Transfers

Adapting RSD to allow trading to occur Pareto-improves the allocation of indivisible goods, at the expense of strategy-proofness.

Transformative AI, Existential Risk, and Real Interest Rates

The arrival of transformative AI implies an increase in real interest rates. Accepted to Oxford GPR ‘23 and covered by Vox, The Economist, The FT, MR etc. Blog post here.

Smoothie: Label Free Language Model Routing

LLM routing scores can be learned without labelled data using a weak-supervision-inspired technique. Accepted to NeurIPS ‘24. Blog post here. Code here.

What Causes Polysemanticity?

Polsemanticity can arise incidentally, due to regularisation pressures and random noise during training. Accepted to BGPT & Re-Align @ ICLR ‘24. Blog post here. Code here.

Explainable Detection of Online Sexism

Fine-tuned BERT models can provide explainable classification of sexist text. Accepted to SemEval @ ACL ‘23.

Randomised Serial Dictatorship with Transfers

Adapting RSD to allow trading to occur Pareto-improves the allocation of indivisible goods, at the expense of strategy-proofness.

Transformative AI, Existential Risk, and Real Interest Rates

The arrival of transformative AI implies an increase in real interest rates. Accepted to Oxford GPR ‘23 and covered by Vox, The Economist, The FT, MR etc. Blog post here.