The LLMentalist Effect (2023)
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work.
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI.
By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
Results and speed for other programs on enwik8 and enwik9 are available at the Large Text Compression Benchmark .
A sampling of recent news
About an aggravating tool-calling regression in newer Claude models.
I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. Then I joined the real world and actually tried to do things. At comma, we ship a hardware product of similar complexity to a cell phone, and it’s really hard. Reality has lots of finicky details…
Does AI-assisted cognition threaten human development? Explore the risks of AI-assisted thinking and learn strategies to use AI tools without freezing your critical thinking.
Why coding agents perform better in cohesive ecosystems like Go than fragmented ones like JavaScript or Python
1991: T and P of ChatGPT, distillation, deep residual learning, LSTM, GAN
I'm a designer and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY.
The largest tell for me to tell where culture and sentiment is shifting for AI tools is usually X, viral GitHub repositories and Hacker News. One of these tells I’ve been seeing a lot lately is skills like I have ADHD and Agents.md instructions such as giving outputs in only ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.
Frontier models can now produce novel historical knowledge, but in a really weird way
Look at the monthly numbers...
Soon, access to frontier AI will be scarce and selective
LLM-based agents can do a lot of tasks. Or, at least, they can appear to do them. For example, they write code, summarize papers, plan trips, and fill in forms. If you ask one for a probability or a confidence score, it will give you one of those too. I have seen many agent designers use LLMs to generate confidence…
Any sufficiently complicated AI system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden implementation of half of DSPy.
Fable is cool yo, it takes jobs yo, - Dario "steve" Altman
At the core of the attention mechanism in LLMs are three matrices: Query, Key, and Value. These matrices are how transformers actually pay attention to different parts of the input. In this write-up, we will go through the construction of these matrices from the ground up.
Fable’s price ended the free lunch of ever-cheaper frontier models. Now we have to think about which model gets which work.
“The devil is in the details,” they say.
The models are good now. But most people still miss the point.
AI-related upgrades like the built-in AI Assistant, extended computation-augmented generation and the Wolfram Agent Tools framework. Advances in TimeSeries & Tabular. New categorical data, ModelFit automated model selection, symbolic music. Efficient handling of gigabyte-sized notebooks. Gains in the already-robust…
I upgraded my Claude Token Counter tool to add the ability to run the same count against different models in order to compare them. As far as I can tell …
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I wrote up my experiences programming with LLMs a bit over a year ago , and updated it for the world of agents eight months ago . A lot has changed since then, so here is an update.
Kelly predicted AI heavyweights while advocating for a future of open weights