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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.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 33 posts.
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Datacenters in space aren't going to work
There is a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch/satellite companies to build datacenters in space. TL;DR: It's not going to work.
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Signs of introspection in large language models
Research on the ability of large language models to introspect on their own internal states.
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What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on
What do Americans die from, and what do the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News report on?
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Reasoning models don't always say what they think
Research from Anthropic on the faithfulness of AI models' chain-of-thought reasoning.
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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
A guest post by David Schneider-Joseph
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Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?
Craig Gidney's computer science blog
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Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything
Batteries are now cheap enough to unleash solar energy’s full potential, getting as close as 97% of the way to delivering constant electricity supply 24 hours across 365 days cost-effectively in the sunniest places.
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Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)
So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.
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Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)
SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION, 17th Annual EOS/ESD Symposium THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1995, 8:00 am SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION: ELECTROSTATIC CONSIDERATIONS IN INDUSTRY MODERATOR: D. Swenson, 3M 7.7 CASE STUDY - LARGE PLASTIC WEB ELECTROSTATIC PROBLEMS, RESULTS, AND CURE, D. Swenson, 3M Company Tremendous static charge…
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Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.
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Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
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DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
Dolphin researchers are using Gemma and Google Pixel phones to try to decipher how dolphins talk to one another.
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Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
Physicist Francis Perrin sat at a nuclearfuel-processing plant down in the south of France, thinking to himself: “This cannot be possible.” It was 1972.
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The Shape of a Mars Mission
“From a mathematics and trajectory standpoint and with a certain kind of technology, there’s not too many different ways to go to Mars. It’s been pretty well figured out. You can adjust the decimal places here and there, but basically if you're talking about chemical rockets, there's a certain way you're going to go…
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Introduction to Digital Filters (2024)
INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL FILTERS WITH AUDIO APPLICATIONS
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New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes
Can optical illusions take you outside the human color gamut?
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Bending Spacetime in the Basement (1997)
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
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ACM Transitions to Full Open Access
Open Access Publication & ACM
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How does the US use water?
Water infrastructure often gets less attention and focus than other types of infrastructure.
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Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space
Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria. That’s what shadow libraries do - collect and share as many
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LLMs aren't world models
I believe that language models aren’t world models. It’s a weak claim — I’m not saying they’re useless, or that we’re done milking them. It’s also a fuzzy-sounding claim — with its trillion weights, who can prove that there’s something an LLM isn't a model of? But I hope to make my claim clear and persuasive enough…
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BusyBeaver(6) Is Quite Large
For overdetermined reasons, I’ve lately found the world an increasingly terrifying and depressing place. It’s gotten harder and harder to concentrate on research, or even popular scienc…
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Marble: A Multimodal World Model
Marble, our frontier multimodal world model, is available to everyone starting today
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Everything is correlated (2014–23)
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
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The Einstein AI Model
I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a compressed 21st century.
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Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01
[You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks ]
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The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe
How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields