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AI & Machine Learning

The most popular blog posts about ai & machine learning on Hacker News. 402 posts.

2023
244

Notes on training BERT from scratch on an 8GB consumer GPU

I trained a BERT model (Devlin et al, 2019) from scratch on my desktop PC (which has a Nvidia 3060 Ti 8GB GPU). The model architecture, tokenizer, and trainer all came from Hugging Face libraries, and my contribution was mainly setting up the code, setting up the data (~20GB uncompressed text), and leaving my computer…

249

Why Do ML on the Erlang VM?

Another question might be; why do machine learning at all? I'm not big into ML/AI though I've been poking it more recently as the open models, such as Stable Diffusion and the more practical Whisper, caught my curiosity. I have a very decent GPU (3090 Ti) and I've poked around a bit. I don't consider ML a super…

253

My deep learning rig (2022)

A lot of people have asked about the computers I used to train TorToiSe. I’ve been meaning to snap some pictures, but it’s never “convenient” to turn these servers off so I keep procrastinating. We had some severe thunderstorms today here i

269

Bayes is guaranteed to overfit

The myth A few years ago I saw a StackOverflow question (but I cannot find it now): allegedly Andrew Gelman blogged that Bayesian models would not overfit and would only underfit (I also cannot find Andrew’s blog post now but I think what he meant by “Bayesian models only underfits” is that you can never fully model…

270

There is no hard takeoff

Back in 2014, Elon Musk referred to AI as summoning the demon. And it wasn’t hard to see that view. Soon, Go agents would beat top humans learning from self play. By the end of 2017, the same algorithm mastered Chess and Shogi. By 2020, it didn’t even need tons of calls to the simulator, and could play Atari too.