Nan Li 李楠

I got my first PhD in philosophy in 2013, working on consciousness and property dualism. Taught philosophy for a few years after that, did postdocs at Rutgers and in Beijing. At some point I decided I wanted to actually build the things I was writing about, so I went back to school for a CS master's at Georgia Tech, worked as an NLP engineer, and started a second PhD at Ghent. That one finishes next month.

I grew up in China and have lived across three continents since. Moving between disciplines and languages a lot tends to make you comfortable not having a clean answer to "so what exactly do you do."

what I work on

Mostly how large language models behave: their moral judgments, what changes when you switch languages, where they fail quietly. Some fairness work too. The first PhD keeps pulling me back into philosophy of AI whether I plan it or not.

lately

I've always used writing to figure out what I actually think. The thoughts tab is where that ends up. The posts there are not polished. Some are about AI research, some are reactions to papers, some are things I noticed and wanted to write down. I prefer it that way.

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