Associate Prof @NortheasternCOE @NUnetsi & @nu_policyschool | Sociotechnical Systems, Computational Social sciences, Human-AI Networks | PhD @Berkeley_EECS

Boston, MA
Joined July 2018
A common claim is that #taste is what humans keep once AI can do the research. But taste is a snapshot of what a field values, and snapshots can be learned. What stays human is the process that changes them. I explore this in my first Substack post: open.substack.com/pub/babakh…
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Mathematics is turning Automathic.
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model. We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results. github.com/openai/math
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1/ It's been quiet here, but not in the MAGICS lab. Time to change that, starting with a new work: can one non-binding sentence stabilize how LLM agents behave in repeated games? We combine game-theoretic experiments with mechanistic interpretability to see whether, and why. 🧵
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4/ Mechanisms: in Qwen, messages reduce action uncertainty and drift between rounds. In all four models, a partner's recent behavior shapes how messages land. Inside the models, removing a late-layer direction during play raises switching (Qwen, layer 22: 6% → 70%).
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Amazing how one (now-retracted) MIT PhD paper wrote the whole “AI makes professionals superhuman” script. A few months ago all researchers wanted its secret sauce; now we’re back to Grandma’s rule: if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.
With the retraction of the MIT paper, we now have no clear experimental evidence that LLMs act as a multiplier for high performers (even though that would still seem to make sense). Lots of evidence that low performers get a big performance boost, though, across many studies.
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Is #causality meaningful without some form of #agency? Yes, we can still have mechanisms, but causation without a conceivable intervention becomes essentially void!
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Verifying causality also becomes impossible: in the absence of any agency, we lose the potential for randomized experiments and genuine natural experiments, as truly exogenous events cease to exist.
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Decline of StackOverflow is more nuanced than it seems. The sharp activity drop in knowledge-sharing platforms has sparked concerns re the sustainability of GenAI. If LLMs depend on human-generated data but reduce content generation, are we hitting the so-called "peak data"? 1/n
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High-rep, high-skill users stay engaged, but their roles are shifting—less novice Q&A, more expert-to-expert interactions. A potential silver lining: while #quantity declines, #quality may evolve in ways that sustain AI training data. 3/n
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Considering the exploration/exploitation trade-offs in knowledge ecosystems: GenAI has taken over the exploitation side—transfer of existing knowledge; But the exploration side, where expertise deepens, and new knowledge emerges, remains active. 4/n papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
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Babak Heydari retweeted
Getting realer... Amazon knows that The Pointillistic City is a book and it's on its way! Next up, physical copies... amazon.com/dp/0262550806/
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I just joined Bluesky and looking to grow my network there: Babak-heydari.bsky.social
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Recent election results are being interpreted as signaling the decline of identity politics. I think this is misleading! What we're witnessing is the formation of more potent identity lines that cut across boundaries taken for granted for the last few decades. 1/3
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Take the Latino vote shift: voters aren't abandoning identity-based alignment; instead responding to emerging identity categories shaped by religious values, economic class, and cultural conservatism - transcending conventional demographic categorizations. 2/3
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The "it's the economy, stupid" argument for decline of identity politics gains credence from widespread econ dissatisfaction. Yet econ conditions, however objective, are still processed through identity-based perceptual filters that define how those realities are interpreted. 3/3
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Babak Heydari retweeted
🚀The IC2S2'25 website is LIVE, and submissions are OPEN! 📍Norrköping, Sweden | July 21-24, 2025 Call for Abstracts - DDL: Feb 24, 2025 Call for Tutorials - DDL: Jan 17, 2025 🔗Explore details & submit: ic2s2-2025.org/ Stay tuned for exciting keynote announcements!
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