Girish Gupta
Beyond the Parrot

Modern AI: anatomy, agency, and a world beyond the stochastic parrot.

  • February 24, 2026

    Back in Cambridge with ERA

    No one steps into the same River Cam twice, for the river is not the same and nor is the person. I was last at King's College, Cambridge twenty years ago, beginning my studies in physics.

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  • January 13, 2026

    Introducing "Beyond the Parrot"

    In 2021, Emily Bender and her collaborators coined the phrase "stochastic parrots" to describe Large Language Models (LLMs).

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  • January 13, 2026

    What I Learned Building and Training an LLM from Scratch (You Can Too)

    In this post, I’ll share what surprised me most about building an LLM from scratch—where structure finally became visible. I wanted to write an autoregressive, transformer-based, decoder-only Large Language Model—like GPT, LLaMA, etc.—without too many abstractions and hand-holding.

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  • March 12, 2025

    An Introduction to AI for Investigation: Theory and Practice

    The following is an edited, Claude-generated summary of a Whisper-generated transcript of a guest lecture I gave at Berkeley's Human Rights Center on March 4, 2025.

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