1
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,011 posts.
2
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
3
How to Write a Spelling Corrector
I figured they, and others, could benefit from an explanation. The full details of an industrial-strength spell corrector are quite complex (you can read a little about it here or here ). But I figured that in the course of a transcontinental plane ride I could write and explain a toy spelling corrector that achieves…
4
Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity
We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.
5
Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud
Secure and private AI processing in the cloud poses a formidable new challenge. To support advanced features of Apple Intelligence with larger foundation models, we created Private Cloud Compute (PCC), a groundbreaking cloud intelligence system designed specifically for private AI processing. Built with custom Apple…
6
7
What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
8
Augmenting Long-term Memory
One day in the mid-1920s, a Moscow newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky entered the laboratory of the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky's boss at the newspaper had noticed that Shereshevsky never needed to take any notes, but somehow still remembered all he was told, and had suggested he get his…
9
Myanmar: Facebook’s systems promoted violence against Rohingya; Meta owes reparations
Facebook owner Meta’s dangerous algorithms and reckless pursuit of profit substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people in 2017, Amnesty International said in a new report published today.
10
The Road to Superintelligence (2015)
Part 1 of 2: "The Road to Superintelligence". Artificial Intelligence — the topic everyone in the world should be talking about.
11
On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
Chomsky's remarks were in response to Steven Pinker's question about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods. This essay is a response to Pinker and Chomsky, and will address these questions:
12
The man who killed Google Search?
Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. UPDATE: Prabhakar has now been deposed as head of search, read here for more details. If you liked
13
The Illustrated Transformer
Discussions: Hacker News (65 points, 4 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (29 points, 3 comments) Translations: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified) 1, Chinese (Simplified) 2, French 1, French 2, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Vietnamese Watch: MIT’s Deep Learning State of the Art lecture…
14
Bayes' Theorem explained by Yudkowsky
Bayes’ Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction.
15
Tracing the thoughts of a large language model
Anthropic's latest interpretability research: a new microscope to understand Claude's internal mechanisms
16
Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference
Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the same question multiple times provides different results. This by itself is not surprising, since getting a result from…
17
GPT-3 Creative Fiction
Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.
18
Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future
I knew the future would be shocking but this is a whole other level.
19
ChatGPT: Optimizing language models for dialogue
We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.
20
Golden Gate Claude
When we amplify the "Golden Gate Bridge" feature, Claude's responses focus on the bridge. For a short time, anyone can interact with this model.
21
Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles
The Waymo Driver autonomously navigates tens of thousands of rider-only miles across San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin daily. It can navigate common scenarios, like adhering to a crossing guard directing traffic, as well as more unique interactions like avoiding a swerving vehicle. As the Waymo Driver…
22
Detecting and Preventing Distillation Attacks
We identified coordinated distillation attacks using ~24,000 fraudulent accounts to extract Claude's capabilities.
23
Fizz Buzz in Tensorflow
interviewer: Welcome, can I get you coffee or anything? Do you need a break? me: No, I've probably had too much coffee already! interviewer: Great, great. And are you OK with writing code on the...
24
25
WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio
This post presents WaveNet, a deep generative model of raw audio waveforms. We show that WaveNets are able to generate speech which mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing Text-to-Speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50%.
26
The Biology of a Large Language Model
We investigate the internal mechanisms used by Claude 3.5 Haiku — Anthropic's lightweight production model — in a variety of contexts, using our circuit tracing methodology.
27
Introducing OpenAI
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive…
28
OpenAI LP
We’ve created OpenAI LP, a new “capped-profit” company that allows us to rapidly increase our investments in compute and talent while including checks and balances to actualize our mission.
29
Clip: Connecting Text and Images
We’re introducing a neural network called CLIP which efficiently learns visual concepts from natural language supervision. CLIP can be applied to any visual classification benchmark by simply providing the names of the visual categories to be recognized, similar to the “zero-shot” capabilities of GPT-2 and GPT-3.
30
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2016, at Web Camp Zagreb [ video ] (45 mins)