Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 422 posts.
Background Backpropagation is a common method for training a neural network. There is no shortage of papers online that attempt to explain how backpropagation works, but few that include an example…
A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
To reject gods and spirits is easy: just bully them away in the name of science.
Across 16 coding models, hashline’s content-hash line anchors beat patch for 14 models; the weakest models gained the most.
Embeddings are a really neat trick that often come wrapped in a pile of intimidating jargon. If you can make it through that jargon, they unlock powerful and exciting techniques …
Deconstructing the real costs of running AI inference at scale. My napkin math suggests the economics might be far more profitable than commonly claimed.
The end of a dramatic weekend in tech is that OpenAI has split and Microsoft is partnered with one and has hired the other; this is the ultimate failure case of what should have been a for-profit c…
A machine learning craftsmanship blog.
( This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. Note: early draft, contains some typos, I'll fix them next week when I get home. )
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
Discussions: Hacker News (64 points, 3 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (219 points, 18 comments) Translations: Simplified Chinese, French, Korean, Russian, Turkish This year, we saw a dazzling application of machine learning. The OpenAI GPT-2 exhibited impressive ability of writing coherent and passionate essays…
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. T…
Throughout the last year I’ve written in detail about the rot in tech — the spuriousness of charlatans looking to accumulate money and power, the desperation of the most powerful executives to maintain control and rapacious growth, and the speciousness of the latest hype cycle — but at the end of
I. H.G. Wells’ 1914 sci-fi book The World Set Free did a pretty good job predicting nuclear weapons:They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands…before the l…
A personal note for the non-tech people in my life on what AI is starting to change — why it's moving faster than you think, and what to do about it.
Before we go any further: I hate to ask you to do this, but I need your help — I'm up for this year's Webbys for the best business podcast award. I know it's a pain in the ass, but can you sign up and vote for Better
Data files are derived from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus , as described by Thorsten Brants and Alex Franz, and distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium.
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
I generated 1,000+ SVGs across 7 frontier models to test whether AI labs are training on Simon Willison’s pelican-riding-a-bicycle benchmark.
Translations: Chinese, Vietnamese. (V2 Nov 2022: Updated images for more precise description of forward diffusion. A few more images in this version) AI image generation is the most recent AI capability blowing people’s minds (mine included). The ability to create striking visuals from text descriptions has a magical…
In which ChatGPT and I invent a fictional language spoken by slime-people
Yesterday, President Joe Biden declared that “it remains to be seen” whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “dangerous.” I would beg to differ. I have been writing about th…
Legal Twitter is having tremendous fun right now reviewing the latest documents from the case Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (1:22-cv-01461). Here’s a neat summary: So, wait. They file a brief …
In Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test, Kevin Lacker found that GPT-3 does well answering simple factual questions like “Who was president of the United States in 1955?”, but also happily answered absurd qu…
This somewhat widely cited post (I keep seeing it cited, anyway) suggests that dynamic languages and/or languages that represent things more concisely are more token efficient. It seems to be cited enough that LLM search results agree. For example, when I searched for "dynamic vs static language token cost" (no…
