Strange Loop Canon
Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations
finding the new equilibrium for the next superpower
3 months ago
finding the new equilibrium for the next superpower
Artificial Ignorance
The hidden side of Apple Intelligence
More than just another keynote recap.
7 months ago
More than just another keynote recap.
Society's Backend
Why Machine Learning Terminology is So Confusing
And definitions for the most important terms you should know
11 months ago
And definitions for the most important terms you should know
Artificial Ignorance
YCombinator's AI boom is still going strong (W24)
Combing through all 158 YC AI startups (65% of the batch).
9 months ago
Combing through all 158 YC AI startups (65% of the batch).
fast.ai
There’s no such thing as not a math person
Many cultural factors, misconceptions, stereotypes, and obstacles turn people off to math.
over a year ago
Many cultural factors, misconceptions, stereotypes, and obstacles turn people off to math.
Artificial Ignorance
A stroll through Google's Model Garden
What generative AI capabilities does Google offer to developers?
a year ago
What generative AI capabilities does Google offer to developers?
Marcus on AI
An epidemic of weirdly precise AI butt facts
The parade of made-up numbers never stops
2 months ago
The parade of made-up numbers never stops
Strange Loop Canon
Google had a very bad week
Gemini's paradox
10 months ago
Society's Backend
All Machine Learning Resources and Updates 06/14/2024
Below are all machine learning resources and updates from the past week you don't want to miss. I’ve...
7 months ago
Below are all machine learning resources and updates from the past week you don't want to miss. I’ve decided to try out separating paid/free updates. I’m constantly trying new ways to make information consumption easier for you while working within the confines of the platforms...
Andrej Karpathy blog
A Survival Guide to a PhD
This guide is patterned after my “Doing well in your courses”, a post I wrote a long time ago on...
over a year ago
This guide is patterned after my “Doing well in your courses”, a post I wrote a long time ago on some of the tips/tricks I’ve developed during my undergrad. I’ve received nice comments about that guide, so in the same spirit, now that my PhD has come to an end I wanted to compile...
Society's Backend
The Fastest Way to Get Up to Speed on Machine Learning Fundamentals for Free
Announcing the ML Road Map-Turbo
7 months ago
Announcing the ML Road Map-Turbo
Artificial Ignorance
OpenAI's o1 is a misunderstood model
Are the latest "reasoning" breakthroughs all they're hyped up to be?
4 months ago
Are the latest "reasoning" breakthroughs all they're hyped up to be?
Rozado’s Visual...
Sentiment Associations of Politically Loaded Terms in News Media
Summary of manuscript “Using Word Embeddings to Probe Sentiment Associations of Politically Loaded...
over a year ago
Summary of manuscript “Using Word Embeddings to Probe Sentiment Associations of Politically Loaded Terms in News and Opinion Articles from News Media Outlets”
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 039: The governance issue
November 3, 2023.
a year ago
Matt Mazur
Sharing small, incremental updates with users
I use a service called Headway to keep Preceden users informed about updates to the product. Headway...
a year ago
I use a service called Headway to keep Preceden users informed about updates to the product. Headway provides a widget I have installed on Preceden to let users know when there have been updates. Users will see a bell with a count of unread items (which Headway keeps track of in...
Artificial Ignorance
The subscriptionization of AI
Navigating the paid AI landscape.
10 months ago
Navigating the paid AI landscape.
Society's Backend
The Metrics Machine Learning Engineers Care About That Modelers Don't
And a brief overview of TPUs in Google data centers
10 months ago
And a brief overview of TPUs in Google data centers
AI Snake Oil
Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle
How AI hype leads to flawed research that fuels more hype
7 months ago
How AI hype leads to flawed research that fuels more hype
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 056: Data deals
March 1, 2024.
10 months ago
Marcus on AI
CONFIRMED: LLMs have indeed reached a point of diminishing returns
Science, sociology, and the likely financial collapse of the Generative AI bubble
2 months ago
Science, sociology, and the likely financial collapse of the Generative AI bubble
Artificial Ignorance
The fable of Reflection 70B
From groundbreaking to grifting.
4 months ago
From groundbreaking to grifting.
One Useful Thing
In Praise of Boring AI
Automation has always been about killing tedious work. AI can do the same.
a year ago
Automation has always been about killing tedious work. AI can do the same.
Made by Ollin
Singing Style Transfer
Initial Experiments
over a year ago
Stories by Andrej...
ICLR 2017 vs arxiv-sanity
over a year ago
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 074: Amazon's Adept acquisition
July 5, 2024.
6 months ago
Artificial Ignorance
Why now?
What's behind our current AI boom?
a year ago
What's behind our current AI boom?
Weighty Thoughts
Apple Wins
Apple Intelligence and aggregation puts Apple in a dominant AI position
7 months ago
Apple Intelligence and aggregation puts Apple in a dominant AI position
One Useful Thing
An Opinionated Guide to Which AI to Use: ChatGPT Anniversary Edition
A simple answer, and then a less simple one.
a year ago
A simple answer, and then a less simple one.
One Useful Thing
Captain's log: the irreducible weirdness of prompting AIs
Also, we have a prompt library!
10 months ago
Also, we have a prompt library!
Artificial Ignorance
AI's massive cash needs are Big Tech's chance to own the future
Over the past year, AI startups have raised some impressive amounts of money. OpenAI raised $10...
11 months ago
Over the past year, AI startups have raised some impressive amounts of money. OpenAI raised $10 billion, Anthropic did $6 billion, Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion, and dozens of companies closed rounds in the hundreds of millions.
Daniel Miessler
Podcast Audio Quality: AI-based Post-processing vs. Hardware
I’ve been podcasting since 2015 and got really into audio when the plague started. Like…too much....
over a year ago
I’ve been podcasting since 2015 and got really into audio when the plague started. Like…too much. Anyway. I’ve been obsessed with podcast audio quality for years, and have been through so…many…iterations of my setup. I started with a Yeti (still a great mic). Did the...
Rozado’s Visual...
Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse
Summary of manuscript “Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse: A...
over a year ago
Summary of manuscript “Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse: A Chronological Analysis”
Weighty Thoughts
The Fall of Data Moats
AI actually makes most data moats weaker
a year ago
AI actually makes most data moats weaker
One Useful Thing
Automating creativity
There is now strong evidence that AI can help make us more innovative.
a year ago
There is now strong evidence that AI can help make us more innovative.
Society's Backend
I Enjoy Technical Interviews and You Can Too
A simple change in mindset that completely changed the way I interview
a year ago
A simple change in mindset that completely changed the way I interview
fast.ai
My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey
Prior to 2020, we never expected to homeschool, and now we have committed to it long-term.
over a year ago
Prior to 2020, we never expected to homeschool, and now we have committed to it long-term.
fast.ai
I was an AI researcher. Now, I am an immunology student.
Last year, I became captivated by a new topic in a way that I hadn’t felt since I first discovered...
a year ago
Last year, I became captivated by a new topic in a way that I hadn’t felt since I first discovered machine learning
Marcus on AI
ChatGPT, at Age Two
The bullshit just keeps on coming.
a month ago
The bullshit just keeps on coming.
Artificial Ignorance
What President Biden's AI executive order actually means
I read all 111 pages so you don't have to.
a year ago
I read all 111 pages so you don't have to.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 073: Music make you lose control
June 28, 2024.
6 months ago
Society's Backend
Google AI Essentials, A New LLM Benchmark, Washington's AI Task Force, and More [Top 10 ML Resource...
Top 10 Machine Learning Resources and Updates Below are the top 10 machine learning resources and...
6 months ago
Top 10 Machine Learning Resources and Updates Below are the top 10 machine learning resources and updates from the past week you don't want to miss. I share more frequent ML updates on X so don’t forget to follow me there. Support Society's Backend for just $1/mo
fast.ai
From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion
Practical Deep Learning for Coders part 2, 2022
over a year ago
Practical Deep Learning for Coders part 2, 2022
One Useful Thing
On speaking to AI
Voice changes a lot of things
5 months ago
Voice changes a lot of things
Daniel Miessler
NO. 369 | Reddit Hack, Deepfake Scams, Embracing Change…
✅ Please subscribe to and give a 17-star review to this show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank...
a year ago
✅ Please subscribe to and give a 17-star review to this show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank you! SECURITY Reddit has confirmed it was hacked, and it’s recommending users add 2FA. The attack started by phishing Reddit employees and stealing credentials and 2FA codes. After...
Artificial Ignorance
Groq, Gemini, and 10x improvements
As a programmer and CTO, I've developed a rough rule of thumb when it comes to scaling systems. When...
11 months ago
As a programmer and CTO, I've developed a rough rule of thumb when it comes to scaling systems. When you scale your inputs (users, page views, messages, etc) by 10x, something breaks. Usually, it's something pretty fundamental. And the end result is that you need to replace a...
Artificial Ignorance
The Chatbot Trap
Why AI products really need some better UX.
2 months ago
Why AI products really need some better UX.
One Useful Thing
When you give a Claude a mouse
Some quick impressions of an actual agent
3 months ago
Some quick impressions of an actual agent
The Gradient
Salmon in the Loop
On fish counting – a complex sociotechnical problem in a field that is going through the process of...
a year ago
On fish counting – a complex sociotechnical problem in a field that is going through the process of digital transformation.
AI Snake Oil
A safe harbor for AI evaluation and red teaming
An argument for legal and technical safe harbors for AI safety and trustworthiness research
10 months ago
An argument for legal and technical safe harbors for AI safety and trustworthiness research
Rozado’s Visual...
RightWingGPT – An AI Manifesting the Opposite Political Biases of ChatGPT
The Dangers of Politically Aligned AIs and their Negative Effects on Societal Polarization
a year ago
The Dangers of Politically Aligned AIs and their Negative Effects on Societal Polarization
Marcus on AI
Where will AI be at the end of 2027? A bet
We, Gary Marcus, author, scientist, and noted AI skeptic, and Miles Brundage, an independent AI...
3 weeks ago
We, Gary Marcus, author, scientist, and noted AI skeptic, and Miles Brundage, an independent AI policy researcher who recently left OpenAI and is bullish on AI progress, have agreed to the following bet, at 10:1 odds, with criteria drawn from two earlier Substack essays by Gary...
Society's Backend
Meet Devansh: Lessons Learned While Building a Community of 193,000 Subscribers
Content creation and networking lessons from a wildly successful freelance tech writer
a year ago
Content creation and networking lessons from a wildly successful freelance tech writer
Artificial Ignorance
The AI research tool that saves me hours every week
And why it might revolutionize the search industry.
a year ago
And why it might revolutionize the search industry.
Society's Backend
The State of AI in China
Is China winning the race to AGI?
6 months ago
Is China winning the race to AGI?
Daniel Miessler
AI Art Just Opened The Threat to Human Work We Were Expecting from AGI
Let me start with the punchline: Something like 80% of most “knowledge work” is about to get...
over a year ago
Let me start with the punchline: Something like 80% of most “knowledge work” is about to get replaced by artificial intelligence. I’m not professionally educated or trained in AI, but I’ve read probably 30 books and spent thousands of hours thinking about it. I am not talking...
One Useful Thing
What OpenAI did
A new model opens up new possibilities
8 months ago
A new model opens up new possibilities
Artificial Ignorance
GPTs won't make you rich
But they'll make you more productive.
a year ago
But they'll make you more productive.
Rozado’s Visual...
Artificial Intelligence and Portraits of 17th Century Physicists
The case for customizable AI systems as an alternative to one-size-fits-all AI systems
11 months ago
The case for customizable AI systems as an alternative to one-size-fits-all AI systems
Strange Loop Canon
Progress
when benefits are worth tallying the human cost of technological leaps
a year ago
when benefits are worth tallying the human cost of technological leaps
Jascha’s blog
Neural network training makes beautiful fractals
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
...
11 months ago
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
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The Berkeley...
Reverse engineering the NTK: towards first-principles architecture design
Deep neural networks have enabled technological wonders ranging from voice recognition to machine...
over a year ago
Deep neural networks have enabled technological wonders ranging from voice recognition to machine transition to protein engineering, but their design and application is nonetheless notoriously unprincipled.
The development of tools and methods to guide this process is one of the...
Society's Backend
Coming soon!
Weekly publications to teach you about the technology that governs our society and how it impacts...
a year ago
Weekly publications to teach you about the technology that governs our society and how it impacts you. Coming in August!
Matt Mazur
“Monthly Billed Annually” is Cursed Copy
There was a great discussion on Twitter recently that began with Daniel Vassallo calling out a SaaS...
a year ago
There was a great discussion on Twitter recently that began with Daniel Vassallo calling out a SaaS for not refunding an accidental annual payment he made on their service. He intended to purchase the monthly plan, but due to an unclear UI and poor copy, he unintentionally...
Rozado’s Visual...
Is the Great Awokening Really Winding Down? Part I: Some Multifaceted Evidence from Twitter Content
There has been some discussion lately by Eric Kaufmann, Tyler Cowen, Balaji Srinivasan, Paul Graham...
a year ago
There has been some discussion lately by Eric Kaufmann, Tyler Cowen, Balaji Srinivasan, Paul Graham and Musa Al Gharbi as to whether The Great Awokening is winding down. I’m going to write a series of blog entries about this topic to contribute to the discussion. In order to do...
Society's Backend
Welcome to 2024: The Year Where AI is No Longer an Option
Why everyone should learn about machine learning
a year ago
Why everyone should learn about machine learning
One Useful Thing
The Homework Apocalypse
Fall is going to be very different this year. Educators need to be ready.
a year ago
Fall is going to be very different this year. Educators need to be ready.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 038: Preparedness
October 27, 2023.
a year ago
AI Snake Oil
The LLaMA is out of the bag. Should we expect a tidal wave of disinformation?
The bottleneck isn't the cost of producing disinfo, which is already very low.
a year ago
The bottleneck isn't the cost of producing disinfo, which is already very low.
Society's Backend
Top 10 Machine Learning Resources and Updates 06/14/2024
A new AI employee, a four hour video on recreating GPT-2, meritocracy at Scale, and more
7 months ago
A new AI employee, a four hour video on recreating GPT-2, meritocracy at Scale, and more
Society's Backend
Mastering the Art of Documentation
Documentation is really just glorified dog sitting
a year ago
Documentation is really just glorified dog sitting
Matt Mazur
Friday Updates: Smart Icons, Automatic Suggestions, Dealing with Spammers, Better Icon Colors
Preceden Lots of updates to Preceden this week: Improving the UX for the AI Suggestions When we...
a year ago
Preceden Lots of updates to Preceden this week: Improving the UX for the AI Suggestions When we rolled out the AI Suggestions feature last week, the typical experience for the user would go something like this: Lots of UX issues there though: To remedy this, I updated Preceden to...
Weighty Thoughts
What I got Right or Wrong in 2020
Reflecting on the Past Year
over a year ago
Reflecting on the Past Year
AI Snake Oil
Evaluating LLMs is a minefield
Annotated slides from a recent talk
a year ago
Annotated slides from a recent talk
Weighty Thoughts
Writing, Originality, and Why Does Anyone Care What I Write About?
Musings, Insecurities, and Thoughts on Writing a Book (or Substack)
4 weeks ago
Musings, Insecurities, and Thoughts on Writing a Book (or Substack)
Artificial Ignorance
GPT-4o and the illusion of AGI
Why speed and multimodality is becoming the name of the game.
8 months ago
Why speed and multimodality is becoming the name of the game.
Rozado’s Visual...
DepolarizingGPT
A Political Chatbot that Gives 3 Politically Diverse Answers to Every Prompt
a year ago
A Political Chatbot that Gives 3 Politically Diverse Answers to Every Prompt
Daniel Miessler
My Philosophy and Recommendations Around the LastPass Breaches
If you follow Information Security at all you are surely aware of the LastPass breach situation. It...
over a year ago
If you follow Information Security at all you are surely aware of the LastPass breach situation. It started back in August of 2022 as a fairly common breach notification on a blog, but it, unfortunately, turned into more of a blog series. The initial blog was on August 25th,...
Made by Ollin
HintBot
Hinting icons automatically with a neural network
over a year ago
Hinting icons automatically with a neural network
fast.ai
AI Safety and the Age of Dislightenment
Model licensing & surveillance will likely be counterproductive by concentrating power in...
a year ago
Model licensing & surveillance will likely be counterproductive by concentrating power in unsustainable ways
Artificial Ignorance
I fell for a deepfake Elon Musk’s cryptocurrency scam bait
A lesson in deepfakes, Ponzi schemes, and YouTube algorithm manipulation.
7 months ago
A lesson in deepfakes, Ponzi schemes, and YouTube algorithm manipulation.
Sam Altman
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get...
a year ago
Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.
Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry...
One Useful Thing
A guide to prompting AI (for what it is worth)
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
a year ago
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
One Useful Thing
It is starting to get strange.
Let's talk about ChatGPT with Code Interpreter & Microsoft Copilot
a year ago
Let's talk about ChatGPT with Code Interpreter & Microsoft Copilot
One Useful Thing
The future, soon: what I learned from Bing's AI
We had a brief glimpse of two different types of AI. Both are significant
a year ago
We had a brief glimpse of two different types of AI. Both are significant
Sam Altman
2017 YC Annual Letter
Dear YC Community:
In response to a comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual...
over a year ago
Dear YC Community:
In response to a comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual letter to the YC community with an update on our progress.
Our mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone. We...
Society's Backend
Know Your Benchmarks
How the Chatbot Arena leaderboard for LLMs works and why it’s important to understand
9 months ago
How the Chatbot Arena leaderboard for LLMs works and why it’s important to understand
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 041: Lyria
November 17, 2023.
a year ago
Society's Backend
Digitizing Smell, Automatic Prompt Optimization, Targeted AI Regulation, an Intro to AI Agents, and...
Society's Backend Reading List 11-04-2024
2 months ago
Society's Backend Reading List 11-04-2024
Society's Backend
Updates to Society's Backend
New benefits for paid subscribers, support Society's Backend for just $1/mo, a referral program, and...
10 months ago
New benefits for paid subscribers, support Society's Backend for just $1/mo, a referral program, and more
Daniel Miessler
My Mom Died on Saturday
My mom died on Saturday. My biological mother became unable to function when I was around five due...
over a year ago
My mom died on Saturday. My biological mother became unable to function when I was around five due to mental illness, which left my dad and me on our own. Sometime after we were blessed with a strong, beautiful soul named Rhonda. My dad and I were like rescue dogs, and she saved...
Sam Altman
Helion
I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion...
over a year ago
I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen.
David and Chris are two of the most impressive founders and builders (in the sense of building fusion machines, in addition to building companies!) I have ever met,...
Artificial Ignorance
How to leverage long form content with AI
Specific tools and tactics for authors, podcasters, and videographers.
7 months ago
Specific tools and tactics for authors, podcasters, and videographers.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 091: Search wars
November 1, 2024.
2 months ago
Matt Mazur
When LTD Purchasers Meet an Inactive User Policy
Last year I participated in a Lifetime Deal (LTD) promotion to offer Preceden to the AppSumo...
a year ago
Last year I participated in a Lifetime Deal (LTD) promotion to offer Preceden to the AppSumo community. Maybe I’ll dive into my experience there in another post, but I wanted to share an interesting thing that’s happening now, a year after the deal ended. AppSumo has a policy...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 086: Llama 3.2
September 27, 2024.
3 months ago
Andrej Karpathy blog
Short Story on AI: Forward Pass
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over a year ago
p {
text-align: justify;
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The inspiration for this short story came to me while reading Kevin Lacker’s Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test. It is probably worth it (though not required) to skim this post to get...
Society's Backend
Meta's New Segmentation Model, A New Open-Source Image Generation Model, Apple Intelligence Model...
Machine learning resources and updates 8/5/2024
5 months ago
Machine learning resources and updates 8/5/2024
Daniel Miessler
The UL Boost Protocol
This is a member-only post. Thank you for being part of this. This is UL Member Content Subscribe...
over a year ago
This is a member-only post. Thank you for being part of this. This is UL Member Content Subscribe Already a member? Login
Weighty Thoughts
VC Office Hours
Talk to James Wang, author of Weighty Thoughts and General Partner of Creative Ventures
11 months ago
Talk to James Wang, author of Weighty Thoughts and General Partner of Creative Ventures
One Useful Thing
What AI can do with a toolbox... Getting started with Code Interpreter
Democratizing data analysis with AI
a year ago
Democratizing data analysis with AI
Artificial Ignorance
States are racing ahead of Congress to regulate deepfakes
Several states just banned deepfakes in political ads and porn.
10 months ago
Several states just banned deepfakes in political ads and porn.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 101: Strange bedfellows
January 17, 2025.
5 days ago
IEEE Spectrum
Forums, Competitions, Challenges: Inspiring Creativity in Robotics
This is a sponsored article brought to you by Khalifa University of Science and Technology.
A total...
3 months ago
This is a sponsored article brought to you by Khalifa University of Science and Technology.
A total of eight intense competitions to inspire creativity and innovation along with 13 forums dedicated to diverse segments of robotics and artificial intelligence will be part of the...
Rozado’s Visual...
Mentions of Political Extremism in English Wikipedia
A data-driven exploration uncovers disparities. Are they shaped by editorial choices or broader...
a month ago
A data-driven exploration uncovers disparities. Are they shaped by editorial choices or broader societal/historical dynamics?
The Berkeley...
Interactive Fleet Learning
Figure 1: “Interactive Fleet Learning” (IFL) refers to robot fleets in industry and academia that...
a year ago
Figure 1: “Interactive Fleet Learning” (IFL) refers to robot fleets in industry and academia that fall back on human teleoperators when necessary and continually learn from them over time.
In the last few years we have seen an exciting development in robotics and artificial...
Rozado’s Visual...
The Increasing Negativity and Emotionality of News Media Headlines
Published article Introduction I have recently published a paper where we describe a chronological...
over a year ago
Published article Introduction I have recently published a paper where we describe a chronological (2000–2019) analysis of sentiment and emotion in 23 million headlines from 47 news media outlets popular in the United States. We used Transformer language models fine-tuned for...
Society's Backend
OpenAI's Strawberry May Enhance AI Reasoning, Optimization of Vision Language Models, Info on...
Weekly updates and resources 7/15/24
6 months ago
Weekly updates and resources 7/15/24
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 033: DALL·E 3
September 22, 2023.
a year ago
One Useful Thing
How to Get an AI to Lie to You in Three Simple Steps
I keep getting fooled by AI, and it seems like others are, too.
a year ago
I keep getting fooled by AI, and it seems like others are, too.
One Useful Thing
The future of education in a world of AI
A positive vision for the transformation to come
a year ago
A positive vision for the transformation to come
One Useful Thing
What just happened
A transformative month rewrites the capabilities of AI
a month ago
A transformative month rewrites the capabilities of AI
Society's Backend
MatMul-free Machine Learning Can Improve Efficiency, Excellent Foundational Learning Resources, SSMs...
The top 10 most important updates of last week: 7/8/24
6 months ago
The top 10 most important updates of last week: 7/8/24
Society's Backend
AI Reading List 2: Mathematical Limitations of LLMs, A SQL Roadmap for Data Science, and...
Society's Backend Reading List 10-14-2024
3 months ago
Society's Backend Reading List 10-14-2024
Society's Backend
Why Rust Isn't Killing C++
And a consideration for choosing a language
9 months ago
And a consideration for choosing a language
The Gradient
Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve
A collection of the best technical, social, and economic arguments
Humans have a good track record...
a year ago
A collection of the best technical, social, and economic arguments
Humans have a good track record of innovation. The mechanization of agriculture, steam engines, electricity, modern medicine, computers, and the internet—these technologies radically changed the world. Still, the...
IEEE Spectrum
Fish-Inspired Sensor "Touches" Using Electric Fields
The ability to detect a nearby presence without seeing or touching it may sound fantastical—but it’s...
a month ago
The ability to detect a nearby presence without seeing or touching it may sound fantastical—but it’s a real ability that some creatures have. A family of African fish known as Mormyrids are weakly electric, and have special organs that can locate a nearby prey, whether it’s in...
Frank’s Ramblings
A Gentle Introduction to Vector Databases
Update: An earlier version of this post was cross-published to the Zilliz learning center, Medium,...
over a year ago
Update: An earlier version of this post was cross-published to the Zilliz learning center, Medium, and DZone.
If you have any feedback, feel free to connect with me on Twitter or Linkedin. If you enjoyed this post and want to learn a bit more about vector databases and embeddings...
Weighty Thoughts
AI's Future in Lung Disease and Medicine
A conversation with two radiologists—who are also experts in AI—about how AI can shape clinical...
a month ago
A conversation with two radiologists—who are also experts in AI—about how AI can shape clinical practice and patient experiences
Andrej Karpathy blog
A Recipe for Training Neural Networks
Some few weeks ago I posted a tweet on “the most common neural net mistakes”, listing a few common...
over a year ago
Some few weeks ago I posted a tweet on “the most common neural net mistakes”, listing a few common gotchas related to training neural nets. The tweet got quite a bit more engagement than I anticipated (including a webinar :)). Clearly, a lot of people have personally encountered...
Matt Mazur
Screw it, I’m Keeping Emergent Mind
A few months ago I announced I was going to try to sell Emergent Mind, my AI news aggregator, so I...
a year ago
A few months ago I announced I was going to try to sell Emergent Mind, my AI news aggregator, so I could focus on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker. I wound up having a lot of discussions with potential buyers, but in the end the offers I received were either too low to be worth...
Society's Backend
Stop Obsessing Over the Product and Start Thinking About the Bigger Picture
The actual takeaways from the iPhone 15 event
a year ago
The actual takeaways from the iPhone 15 event
Sam Altman
Time to Take a Stand
It is time for tech companies to start speaking up about
some of the actions taken by President...
over a year ago
It is time for tech companies to start speaking up about
some of the actions taken by President Trump’s administration.
There are many actions from his first week that are
objectionable. In repeatedly
invoking unsubstantiated conspiracy theories (like the 3 million...
Matt Mazur
LearnGPT is now EmergentMind
Naming things is hard. Shortly after ChatGPT launched at the end of November, I decided to build a...
a year ago
Naming things is hard. Shortly after ChatGPT launched at the end of November, I decided to build a site to share ChatGPT examples and eventually be the home to educational content to help people learn more about GPT. To my surprise, there were a lot of relevant available .com...
The Berkeley...
Keeping Learning-Based Control Safe by Regulating Distributional Shift
To regulate the distribution shift experience by learning-based controllers, we seek a mechanism for...
over a year ago
To regulate the distribution shift experience by learning-based controllers, we seek a mechanism for constraining the agent to regions of high data density throughout its trajectory (left). Here, we present an approach which achieves this goal by combining features of density...
The Gradient
Financial Market Applications of LLMs
The AI revolution drove frenzied investment in both private and public companies and captured the...
9 months ago
The AI revolution drove frenzied investment in both private and public companies and captured the public’s imagination in 2023. Transformational consumer products like ChatGPT are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) that excel at modeling sequences of tokens that represent...
Strange Loop Canon
Evaluations are all we need
On analysing talent in LLMs
a year ago
On analysing talent in LLMs
AI Snake Oil
Starting reading the AI Snake Oil book online today
The book will be published on September 24
4 months ago
The book will be published on September 24
AI Snake Oil
ML is useful for many things, but not for predicting scientific replicability
How the veneer of AI is used to legitimize awful ideas
a year ago
How the veneer of AI is used to legitimize awful ideas
Weighty Thoughts
Who’s Winning the AI War?
All of us, except the AI startups and VCs—unless a real war breaks out
a year ago
All of us, except the AI startups and VCs—unless a real war breaks out
Daniel Miessler
My Prediction For Twitter
I’m a bit Elon and Twittered out, but I want to capture a basic prediction about all the...
over a year ago
I’m a bit Elon and Twittered out, but I want to capture a basic prediction about all the shenanigans. As for my take on things, I will just say that Elon miscalculated a number of things in his handling of the transition. I think he thought his actions would be better received....
Andrej Karpathy blog
A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
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...
over a year ago
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max-width: 900px;
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font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 15px;
font-weight: 300;
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Society's Backend
Alignment: Understanding the Multi-Billion Dollar Opportunity within Machine Learning
A glimpse into the biggest challenge in the world of AI, why it matters to you, and why it's worth...
11 months ago
A glimpse into the biggest challenge in the world of AI, why it matters to you, and why it's worth so much
Daniel Miessler
Custom Models Are AI’s Killer App
The killer app for AI right now is the universal “custom AI model”. Consume your whole business. Or...
a year ago
The killer app for AI right now is the universal “custom AI model”. Consume your whole business. Or your whole life experience. Every text. Every Slack. Every journal entry. Every blog post. Everything you’ve said or written publicly. All your logs. All your documentation. Turn...
One Useful Thing
Doing Stuff with AI: Opinionated Midyear Edition
AI systems have gotten more capable and easier to use
7 months ago
AI systems have gotten more capable and easier to use
AI Snake Oil
GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question
OpenAI may have tested on the training data. Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots.
a year ago
OpenAI may have tested on the training data. Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots.
Society's Backend
Resources to Get a Job in ML, Post-Transformer Architectures, What's in Store for 2025, and More
Society's Backend Reading List 12-30-2024
3 weeks ago
Society's Backend Reading List 12-30-2024
Matt Mazur
AOL Underground Podcast Interview about AOL-Files.com
Back in 1998 when I was 13 years old I got heavily involved in the AOL hacking scene, originally...
over a year ago
Back in 1998 when I was 13 years old I got heavily involved in the AOL hacking scene, originally building add-on software called progs (Revolution, Meridian), publishing code libraries called bas files (Alpha32), and later co-founding AOL-Files.com (where I went by the hacker...
Strange Loop Canon
What can LLMs never do?
On goal drift and lower reliability. Or, why can't LLMs play Conway's Game Of Life?
9 months ago
On goal drift and lower reliability. Or, why can't LLMs play Conway's Game Of Life?
The Berkeley...
Why do Policy Gradient Methods work so well in Cooperative MARL? Evidence from Policy Representation
In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), due to its on-policy nature, policy...
over a year ago
In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), due to its on-policy nature, policy gradient (PG) methods are typically believed to be less sample efficient than value decomposition (VD) methods, which are off-policy. However, some recent empirical studies demonstrate...
Matt Mazur
Full Time Indie Hacking: Month 5 Update
At the beginning of the year I quit consulting to focus full time on Preceden, my SaaS timeline...
a year ago
At the beginning of the year I quit consulting to focus full time on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker tool. I also started working on a new side project, Emergent Mind, an AI-powered AI news site. My last update on how things were going was after 3 months which provides more...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 052: AI, EO, DPA
February 2, 2024.
11 months ago
Daniel Miessler
NO. 362 | Dependency Scanner, Citrix Attacks, AI Analysis…
SECURITY NEWS Google released an open-source scanner for vulnerabilities in project dependencies....
over a year ago
SECURITY NEWS Google released an open-source scanner for vulnerabilities in project dependencies. It's a front-end to the OSV database that links a dependency list to its vulnerabilities. MORE The latest updates for Apple software fixed a new zero-day that could be used to hack...
IEEE Spectrum
Asimov's Laws of Robotics Need an Update for AI
In 1942, the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov introduced his Three Laws of Robotics in...
a week ago
In 1942, the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov introduced his Three Laws of Robotics in his short story “Runaround.” The laws were later popularized in his seminal story collection I, Robot.
First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow...
One Useful Thing
An AI Haunted World
Intelligence, everywhere.
a year ago
Intelligence, everywhere.
Stories by Andrej...
Yes you should understand backprop
over a year ago
Society's Backend
A Technical Perspective: Has Google Search Gotten Worse?
Providing a technical perspective for a more educated assessment of a complaint I hear quite...
3 months ago
Providing a technical perspective for a more educated assessment of a complaint I hear quite frequently
Daniel Miessler
NO. 359 | WhatsLeak, CCTV Ban, Meta Threats
SECURITY NEWS There appears to be a WhatsApp data leak of over 500 million users' data in 84...
over a year ago
SECURITY NEWS There appears to be a WhatsApp data leak of over 500 million users' data in 84 countries. They're supposedly selling the data for $7K in the UK, and around $2K in the US and Germany. MORE The FCC has banned Chinese CCTV cameras on sensitive government sites and...
One Useful Thing
I hope you weren't getting too comfortable.
I just got access to the new Bing AI. My initial thoughts are that our assumptions about the limits...
a year ago
I just got access to the new Bing AI. My initial thoughts are that our assumptions about the limits of AI were wrong.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 045: Google's just getting started
December 15, 2023.
a year ago
fast.ai
Mojo may be the biggest programming language advance in decades
Mojo is a new programming language, based on Python, which fixes Python’s performance and deployment...
a year ago
Mojo is a new programming language, based on Python, which fixes Python’s performance and deployment problems.
Rozado’s Visual...
Pessimism in News Media Headlines
In previous work, I documented the growing emotional negativity (anger, fear, sadness, etc) of...
a year ago
In previous work, I documented the growing emotional negativity (anger, fear, sadness, etc) of American news media headlines between the years 2000 and 2019. Here, I extend that work by examining the attitudinal tone (pessimism, optimism or neutrality
Society's Backend
Backend Biweekly #3: 97 Updates and Resources
Huge Nvidia Updates, Gemini Hackathon for Money, and more
9 months ago
Huge Nvidia Updates, Gemini Hackathon for Money, and more
Artificial Ignorance
The intern and the coach
A recent post from Wharton professor Ethan Mollick shared an impressive new study. In a nutshell, it...
a year ago
A recent post from Wharton professor Ethan Mollick shared an impressive new study. In a nutshell, it found that BCG consultants who used GPT-4 were up to 43% more effective at tasks vs. employees who didn’t.
Marcus on AI
Humanity’s “Oh shit!” AI moment?
Not yet, but it could come sooner than you think. Not because we are close to AGI, but because we...
a month ago
Not yet, but it could come sooner than you think. Not because we are close to AGI, but because we already have machines that can say one thing and do something else altogether.
One Useful Thing
Now is the time for grimoires
It isn't data that will unlock AI, it is human expertise
a year ago
It isn't data that will unlock AI, it is human expertise
Artificial Ignorance
Blade Runner 2024
Reddit's AI Hunters and the quest for authentic digital experiences.
4 months ago
Reddit's AI Hunters and the quest for authentic digital experiences.
Made by Ollin
NVIDIA Internship (2017)
Notes on my internship at NVIDIA Redmond.
over a year ago
Notes on my internship at NVIDIA Redmond.
Daniel Miessler
Something is Up With Meritocracy
I’ve been thinking a lot about meritocracy lately, and I’ve come to believe that opportunity...
over a year ago
I’ve been thinking a lot about meritocracy lately, and I’ve come to believe that opportunity magnifies inequality. Here’s one way I’ve seen it explained: If there are two main reasons for outcome differences: innate talent and environment, and if you equalize environment you will...
One Useful Thing
On the necessity of a sin
Why treating AI like a person is the future
9 months ago
Why treating AI like a person is the future
The Gradient
Why Doesn’t My Model Work?
Have you ever trained a model you thought was good, but then it failed miserably when applied to...
11 months ago
Have you ever trained a model you thought was good, but then it failed miserably when applied to real world data? If so, you’re in good company.
Daniel Miessler
Companies as Alaskan Fishing Boats
What if companies are supposed to be like Alaskan fishing boats? You know, the kind on The Deadliest...
over a year ago
What if companies are supposed to be like Alaskan fishing boats? You know, the kind on The Deadliest Catch. So you have this tiny crew of total badasses. Everyone is a superhero at their particular role because the crew needs to stay extremely small to protect profits. The...
Matt Mazur
It’s Time to Build
It’s been a few months so I wanted to say hey to the 7 of you who follow this blog and share a few...
9 months ago
It’s been a few months so I wanted to say hey to the 7 of you who follow this blog and share a few updates about what I’ve been up to. Quick recap At the start of 2023 I quit consulting to go full time on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker, after growing it on … Continue reading...
One Useful Thing
The Lazy Tyranny of the Wait Calculation
Taking AI timelines seriously
a year ago
Taking AI timelines seriously
Strange Loop Canon
State of the Canon
Onwards
a year ago
Artificial Ignorance
Tutorial: How to build an AI agent (Part 2)
Part 2: Giving our agent internet access.
a year ago
Part 2: Giving our agent internet access.
Strange Loop Canon
What would a world with AGI look like?
11 hours ago
Artificial Ignorance
Distributing the future
A reminder that things take time.
7 months ago
A reminder that things take time.
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Multiple MagicBots
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE...
a month ago
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Humanoids Summit: 11–12 December...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 034: Meta Connect
September 29, 2023
a year ago
Matt Mazur
Indie Hacking Week 2 Recap – TimelineGPT Progress, LearnGPT Decision Time
For Martin Luther King weekend my family and I headed to Boone, North Carolina and stayed in a cabin...
over a year ago
For Martin Luther King weekend my family and I headed to Boone, North Carolina and stayed in a cabin for a few days. We went snow tubing at Beech Mountain while we were there, one of the many ski resorts in the area. As is common on vacations, I spent way too much time thinking...
The Gradient
A Brief Overview of Gender Bias in AI
A brief overview and discussion on gender bias in AI
9 months ago
A brief overview and discussion on gender bias in AI
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 058: Devin and SIMA
March 15, 2023.
10 months ago
Rozado’s Visual...
Excess mortality during COVID pandemic, % of population vaccinated and Stringency Index of...
Please be mindful of potential confounds: population density, population behavior, virus virulence...
over a year ago
Please be mindful of potential confounds: population density, population behavior, virus virulence drift, herd immunity, etc.
fast.ai
Practical Deep Learning for Coders 2022
A complete from-scratch rewrite of fast.ai’s most popular course, that’s been 2 years in the making.
over a year ago
A complete from-scratch rewrite of fast.ai’s most popular course, that’s been 2 years in the making.
Daniel Miessler
Summary: Andrej Karpathy on Lex Fridman’s Podcast (Late 2022)
This is member content. Thank you for being a subscriber. This is UL Member Content Subscribe...
a year ago
This is member content. Thank you for being a subscriber. This is UL Member Content Subscribe Already a member? Login
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 082: System prompts
August 30, 2024.
4 months ago
Strange Loop Canon
LLMs have special intelligence, not general, and that's plenty.
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
10 months ago
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
One Useful Thing
How to Use AI to Do Stuff: An Opinionated Guide
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
a year ago
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Quadruped Ladder Climbing
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE...
3 months ago
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
IROS 2024: 14–18 October 2024, ABU...
fast.ai
Qualitative humanities research is crucial to AI
Following the thread of any seemingly quantitative issue in AI ethics (such as determining if...
over a year ago
Following the thread of any seemingly quantitative issue in AI ethics (such as determining if software to rate loan applicants is racially biased or evaluating YouTube’s recommendation system) quickly leads to a host of qualitative questions. Unfortunately, there is often a large...
Marcus on AI
The 2023 White House Executive Order on AI has Been Rescinded
See here.
yesterday
Matt Mazur
Exploring ChatGPT’s Knowledge Cutoff
A recurring topic of discussion on the OpenAI forums, on Reddit, and on Twitter is about what...
a year ago
A recurring topic of discussion on the OpenAI forums, on Reddit, and on Twitter is about what ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff date actually is. It seems like it should be straightforward enough to figure out (just ask it), but it can be confusing due to ChatGPT’s inconsistent answers...
Weighty Thoughts
The AI Executive Order
AKA: “We’ll do something about it later”
a year ago
AKA: “We’ll do something about it later”
Society's Backend
How to Know if Your Data is Being Used Maliciously
The information you should know about a company before gifting them your data
a year ago
The information you should know about a company before gifting them your data
Marcus on AI
Satya Nadella and the three stages of scientific truth
A textbook case in how good ideas are often initially throttled
a month ago
A textbook case in how good ideas are often initially throttled
Society's Backend
A Privacy Review: TikTok
You should stick to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts
a year ago
You should stick to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts
Society's Backend
New Evals for Better Models, AI Research Papers Made Easier to Understand, Train Your Own Flux LoRA,...
Machine learning highlights and resources 9-23-24
4 months ago
Machine learning highlights and resources 9-23-24
Marcus on AI
25 AI Predictions for 2025, from Marcus on AI
With a review of last year’s predictions
2 weeks ago
With a review of last year’s predictions
PromptArmor Blog
Announcing LASEC: LLM Application Security Executive Certification
Including a never before seen exploit from PromptArmor's cutting edge threat intelligence team.
10 months ago
Including a never before seen exploit from PromptArmor's cutting edge threat intelligence team.
Strange Loop Canon
The agent principal problem
"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."
a year ago
"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."
The Berkeley...
Goal Representations for Instruction Following
Goal Representations for Instruction Following
Figure title. Figure caption. This image is...
a year ago
Goal Representations for Instruction Following
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A longstanding goal of the field of robot learning has been to create generalist agents that can perform tasks for humans. Natural language has...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 096: Happy Shipmas
December 6, 2024.
a month ago
The Gradient
Car-GPT: Could LLMs finally make self-driving cars happen?
Exploring the utility of large language models in autonomous driving: Can they be trusted for...
10 months ago
Exploring the utility of large language models in autonomous driving: Can they be trusted for self-driving cars, and what are the key challenges?
Sam Altman
DALL•E 2
Today we did a research launch of DALL•E 2, a new AI tool that can create and edit images from...
over a year ago
Today we did a research launch of DALL•E 2, a new AI tool that can create and edit images from natural language instructions.
Most importantly, we hope people love the tool and find it useful. For me, it’s the most delightful thing to play with we’ve created so far. I find it to...
Society's Backend
Why MLX is Important for the ML Community
And a step-by-step guide to train a machine learning model on your Mac
8 months ago
And a step-by-step guide to train a machine learning model on your Mac
Artificial Ignorance
The ideologies fighting for the soul (and future) of AI
EAs, e/accs, decels, and doomers.
a year ago
EAs, e/accs, decels, and doomers.
Rozado’s Visual...
Prevalence in News Media of Two Competing Hypotheses about COVID-19 Origins
Published article Quick Twitter summary Introduction As of August 2021, the origins of the...
over a year ago
Published article Quick Twitter summary Introduction As of August 2021, the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic remain a mystery. This essay summarizes a recent article I published about the prevalence in news media articles of two popular hypotheses...
Matt Mazur
Emergent Mind finally went viral
Last week, the Twitter account Everything Out of Context posted a screenshot showing Google’s...
a year ago
Last week, the Twitter account Everything Out of Context posted a screenshot showing Google’s incorrect response to the search query “country in africa that starts with k”: The tweet went viral, garnering over 133k likes, 6k retweets, and 1k replies. Someone eventually tagged me...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 100: CES
January 10, 2025.
a week ago
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 040: GPTs
November 10, 2023.
a year ago
IEEE Spectrum
Boston Dynamics’ Latest Vids Show Atlas Going Hands On
Boston Dynamics is the master of dropping amazing robot videos with no warning, and last week, we...
2 months ago
Boston Dynamics is the master of dropping amazing robot videos with no warning, and last week, we got a surprise look at the new electric Atlas going “hands on” with a practical factory task.
This video is notable because it’s the first real look we’ve had at the new Atlas doing...
IEEE Spectrum
Why Simone Giertz, the Queen of Useless Robots, Got Serious
On YouTube she demonstrated a hilarious series of self-built mechanized devices that worked...
3 months ago
On YouTube she demonstrated a hilarious series of self-built mechanized devices that worked perfectly for ridiculous applications, such as a headboard-mounted alarm clock with a rubber hand to slap the user awake.
This article is part of our special report, “Reinventing...
Matt Mazur
Turning Down $7k for a Side Project I Announced Two Weeks Ago I was Shutting Down
About two weeks ago I announced I was shutting down LearnGPT. After the announcement, I received a...
a year ago
About two weeks ago I announced I was shutting down LearnGPT. After the announcement, I received a lot of interest from people interested in taking it over, so I decided to try to sell it instead of shutting it down. I wound up receiving two offers, one for $6.5k and one for $7k,...
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Mars Chopper
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE...
a month ago
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA,...
Matt Mazur
Updates: Preceden Trends, Training Help Scout’s New Analytics Engineer, Don’t Look Up, and Ray...
Preceden Recurring Revenue: In January 2021 I introduced automatically recurring annual plans to...
over a year ago
Preceden Recurring Revenue: In January 2021 I introduced automatically recurring annual plans to Preceden. Prior to that the annual plans did not renew automatically which was an intentional (but bad) choice I had made because most users did not user Preceden for more than a...
Sam Altman
Project Covalence
Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support...
over a year ago
Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—for companies focusing on developing novel drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, rapidly spinning up trials is one of their biggest bottlenecks.
Science remains the...
Daniel Miessler
Unsupervised Learning NO. 365 | China’s Decline, MicrosoftAI, Creativity Ratio…
🎙️If you're not subscribed to the podcast version of the newsletter, please add it using with your...
over a year ago
🎙️If you're not subscribed to the podcast version of the newsletter, please add it using with your favorite client! APPLE | SPOTIFY | OTHER SECURITY NEWS NYC Surveillance Amnesty International has revealed new research showing that the NYPD has over 15,000 cameras that can do...
Artificial Ignorance
Workshop: Prompt Engineering for Claude
Watch now | If you’ve ever wanted to level up your AI prompting skills, this is the workshop for...
3 months ago
Watch now | If you’ve ever wanted to level up your AI prompting skills, this is the workshop for you.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 029: Hug all the faces
August 25, 2023
a year ago
IEEE Spectrum
The Top 7 Robotics Stories of 2024
2024 was the best year ever for robotics, which I’m pretty sure is not something that I’ve ever said...
3 weeks ago
2024 was the best year ever for robotics, which I’m pretty sure is not something that I’ve ever said before. But that’s the great thing about robotics—it’s always new, and it’s always exciting. What may be different about this year is the real sense that not only is AI going to...
One Useful Thing
Innovation through prompting
Democratizing educational technology... and more
9 months ago
Democratizing educational technology... and more
Society's Backend
3 Key Principles for AI at Scale [Part 2]
The key to how large AI companies outcompete
2 weeks ago
The key to how large AI companies outcompete
Made by Ollin
Acapella Extraction with ConvNets
A working prototype
over a year ago
Matt Mazur
Emergent Mind in The Atlantic
One of the many people who saw the incorrect Google Quick Answer about Kenya was an editor at The...
a year ago
One of the many people who saw the incorrect Google Quick Answer about Kenya was an editor at The Atlantic who asked Caroline Mimbs Nyce, one of their reporters, to look into it. Caroline interviewed me for the article they just published which focused on the challenges Google is...
Frank’s Ramblings
Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW)
(Note: A version of this post has been cross-published to the Zilliz blog)
In a previous blog, we...
a year ago
(Note: A version of this post has been cross-published to the Zilliz blog)
In a previous blog, we took a look at scalar quantization and product quantization - two indexing strategies which are used to reduce the overall size of the database without reducing the scope of a...
AI Snake Oil
Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks
Non-proliferation only benefits incumbents
a year ago
Non-proliferation only benefits incumbents
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 093: Diminishing returns
November 15, 2024.
2 months ago
Andrej Karpathy blog
Short Story on AI: A Cognitive Discontinuity.
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The idea of writing a collection of short stories has been on my mind...
over a year ago
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The idea of writing a collection of short stories has been on my mind for a while. This post is my first ever half-serious attempt at a story, and what better way to kick things off than with a story on AI and what that might look like if you...
Society's Backend
AI Video Editing, MLX vs PyTorch, AI in Space, and More [Comprehensive ML Resource List for 6/28/24]
Here is a comprehensive list of all machine learning resources and updates from the past week. Thank...
6 months ago
Here is a comprehensive list of all machine learning resources and updates from the past week. Thank you for supporting Society's Backend! Don't forget to also follow me on X. Claude 3.5 Sonnet Can Long-Context Language Models Subsume Retrieval, RAG, SQL, and More?
Marcus on AI
AGI versus “broad, shallow intelligence”
The BSI we have now, versus the AGI we want
a week ago
The BSI we have now, versus the AGI we want
Strange Loop Canon
No, LLMs are not "scheming"
a month ago
The Berkeley...
Fully Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Applications to Mobile Manipulation
Reinforcement learning provides a conceptual framework for autonomous agents to learn from...
over a year ago
Reinforcement learning provides a conceptual framework for autonomous agents to learn from experience, analogously to how one might train a pet with treats. But practical applications of reinforcement learning are often far from natural: instead of using RL to learn through trial...
Matt Mazur
Nick Kolenda Reviews Preceden
Nick Kolenda is an author, teacher, and consultant who specializes in the psychology of marketing...
over a year ago
Nick Kolenda is an author, teacher, and consultant who specializes in the psychology of marketing and related topics like pricing optimization, sales psychology, and website behavior. He’s also happens to be a regular in a poker game I host each week. A few months back he...
AI Snake Oil
The bait and switch behind AI risk prediction tools
Toronto recently used an AI tool to predict when a public beach will be safe. It went horribly awry....
over a year ago
Toronto recently used an AI tool to predict when a public beach will be safe. It went horribly awry. The developer claimed the tool achieved over 90% accuracy in predicting when beaches would be safe to swim in. But the tool did much worse: on a majority of the days when the...
Artificial Ignorance
Saving the world with AI and government grants
Listen now | A conversation with Helena Merk, founder and CEO of Streamline Climate.
6 months ago
Listen now | A conversation with Helena Merk, founder and CEO of Streamline Climate.
One Useful Thing
Secret Cyborgs: The Present Disruption in Three Papers
The future is already here, we just need to figure out a few details.
a year ago
The future is already here, we just need to figure out a few details.
Weighty Thoughts
Compute is Overrated as AI’s Bottleneck
You can’t just blindly extrapolate compute requirements
a year ago
You can’t just blindly extrapolate compute requirements
One Useful Thing
How to... use AI to unstick yourself
We often lose momentum because of something small. AI can help.
a year ago
We often lose momentum because of something small. AI can help.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 036: The money pit
October 13, 2023.
a year ago
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 057: Claude 3
March 8, 2024.
10 months ago
IEEE Spectrum
Ensuring the Security and Resilience of Autonomous Fleets with Advanced Testing Frameworks
Autonomous systems, particularly fleets of drones and other unmanned vehicles, face increasing risks...
2 weeks ago
Autonomous systems, particularly fleets of drones and other unmanned vehicles, face increasing risks as their complexity grows. Despite advancements, existing testing frameworks fall short in addressing end-to-end security, resilience, and safety in zero-trust environments. The...
Society's Backend
Ask Stupid Questions
I’m convinced that after having a fourth or fifth child exhaustion kicks in and a person’s long-term...
a year ago
I’m convinced that after having a fourth or fifth child exhaustion kicks in and a person’s long-term memory ceases to function properly. I’ve become victim to this and I’ve started taking very detailed notes during meetings. If my brain won’t store the information, something else...
The Berkeley...
Are We Ready for Multi-Image Reasoning? Launching VHs: The Visual Haystacks Benchmark!
Humans excel at processing vast arrays of visual information, a skill that is crucial for achieving...
6 months ago
Humans excel at processing vast arrays of visual information, a skill that is crucial for achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). Over the decades, AI researchers have developed Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems to interpret scenes within single images and answer...
Society's Backend
LLM Research Recap of 2024, Fine-tuning LLM Judges, Amazon's Nova Models, Google's Genie 2, and More
Society's Backend Reading List 12-10-2024
a month ago
Society's Backend Reading List 12-10-2024
One Useful Thing
Detecting the Secret Cyborgs
The AI Trap for Organizations
a year ago
The AI Trap for Organizations
Society's Backend
How to Use Benchmarks to Build Successful Machine Learning Systems
And what benchmarks mean for real-world applications
5 months ago
And what benchmarks mean for real-world applications
Weighty Thoughts
The EU is making itself an economic backwater
Regulation is not a real export
6 months ago
Regulation is not a real export
One Useful Thing
Scaling: The State of Play in AI
A brief intergenerational pause...
4 months ago
A brief intergenerational pause...
Society's Backend
The Slow, Painful Death of the Free Content Creator
It's happening as you read this
a year ago
It's happening as you read this
Rozado’s Visual...
New York Times Word Usage Frequency Chart – An Update
A timely update of an informative chart
a year ago
A timely update of an informative chart
One Useful Thing
Almost an Agent: What GPTs can do
Also, my book has a cover (also I have a book coming out)
a year ago
Also, my book has a cover (also I have a book coming out)
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 049: Down the Rabbit hole
January 12, 2023.
a year ago
Daniel Miessler
What Made the 90’s So Awesome?
I just read a brilliant essay about the 90’s by Freddie de Boer, and it got me thinking. What made...
a year ago
I just read a brilliant essay about the 90’s by Freddie de Boer, and it got me thinking. What made the 90’s so great? Here’s GPT’s answer: Give a 90’s lover’s view of what made the 90’s awesome. Include everything from parenting, art, entertainment, games, childhood, movies, TV,...
Society's Backend
What Makes Machine Learning so Hard for Software Engineers
How decades of learning a mindset makes adapting difficult
5 months ago
How decades of learning a mindset makes adapting difficult
AI Snake Oil
Eighteen pitfalls to beware of in AI journalism
A checklist for avoiding hype
over a year ago
A checklist for avoiding hype
Artificial Ignorance
How to reverse engineer the Substack (or any!) web API
Building an unauthorized Substack client with Claude.
5 months ago
Building an unauthorized Substack client with Claude.
Daniel Miessler
OpenAI’s Purpose is to Build AGI, and What That Means
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said multiple times that, He says it in this video as well. >...
over a year ago
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said multiple times that, He says it in this video as well. > We’re very much here to build AGI. Sam Altman I am not sure how many people realize this about the company. They’re not like playing with other AI-related tech and AGI might come out...
Sam Altman
Idea Generation
The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The...
over a year ago
The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup.
But giving founders an idea almost always doesn’t work. Having ideas is among the most important qualities for...
Rozado’s Visual...
The Great Awokening as a Global Phenomenon
The striking synchronicity with which Great Awokening terminology increased in news media worldwide
a year ago
The striking synchronicity with which Great Awokening terminology increased in news media worldwide
Rozado’s Visual...
The Political Biases of Google Bard
It is probably only a matter of time until a nation state purposely builds a biased AI system...
a year ago
It is probably only a matter of time until a nation state purposely builds a biased AI system designed to advance government interests
Society's Backend
Devin Has Exposed a Major Issue with Software Engineering
And isn't that we're all going to lose our jobs
10 months ago
And isn't that we're all going to lose our jobs
The Gradient
The Artificiality of Alignment
This essay first appeared in Reboot.
Credulous, breathless coverage of “AI existential risk”...
a year ago
This essay first appeared in Reboot.
Credulous, breathless coverage of “AI existential risk” (abbreviated “x-risk”) has reached the mainstream. Who could have foreseen that the smallcaps onomatopoeia “ꜰᴏᴏᴍ” — both evocative of and directly derived from children’s cartoons —
The Berkeley...
Asymmetric Certified Robustness via Feature-Convex Neural Networks
Asymmetric Certified Robustness via Feature-Convex Neural Networks
TLDR: We propose the asymmetric...
a year ago
Asymmetric Certified Robustness via Feature-Convex Neural Networks
TLDR: We propose the asymmetric certified robustness problem, which requires certified robustness for only one class and reflects real-world adversarial scenarios. This focused setting allows us to introduce...
AI Snake Oil
Introducing the REFORMS checklist for ML-based science
ML-based science is in trouble. Clear reporting standards for researchers could help.
a year ago
ML-based science is in trouble. Clear reporting standards for researchers could help.
Society's Backend
You Are What You Eat: Digital Edition
Why who you follow is more important than who follows you
a year ago
Why who you follow is more important than who follows you
The Berkeley...
GPT-4 + Stable-Diffusion = ?: Enhancing Prompt Understanding of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with...
TL;DR: Text Prompt -> LLM -> Intermediate Representation (such as an image layout) -> Stable...
a year ago
TL;DR: Text Prompt -> LLM -> Intermediate Representation (such as an image layout) -> Stable Diffusion -> Image.
Recent advancements in text-to-image generation with diffusion models have yielded remarkable results synthesizing highly realistic and diverse images. However,...
Society's Backend
Why everyone loves Spider-Man
Lessons anyone can learn from our friendly neighborhood web-crawler
a year ago
Lessons anyone can learn from our friendly neighborhood web-crawler
AI Snake Oil
Can AI automate computational reproducibility?
A new benchmark to measure the impact of AI on improving science
4 months ago
A new benchmark to measure the impact of AI on improving science
Rozado’s Visual...
El sesgo político de ChatGPT
A la izquierda del centro político
over a year ago
A la izquierda del centro político
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 067: GPT-4o and Google I/O
May 17, 2024.
8 months ago
Artificial Ignorance
Workshop: Midjourney Masterclass with Daniel Nest
“This is one of the only webinars where I've actually been glued to my screen for the entire time,...
4 months ago
“This is one of the only webinars where I've actually been glued to my screen for the entire time, not distracted by passing whimsies...
AI Snake Oil
AI safety is not a model property
Trying to make an AI model that can’t be misused is like trying to make a computer that can’t be...
10 months ago
Trying to make an AI model that can’t be misused is like trying to make a computer that can’t be used for bad things
Made by Ollin
Maple Diffusion
I ported Stable Diffusion to my phone
over a year ago
I ported Stable Diffusion to my phone
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 026: AudioCraft
August 4, 2023
a year ago
One Useful Thing
Blinded by Analogies
What is this AI thing? The wrong model can lead us astray
a year ago
What is this AI thing? The wrong model can lead us astray
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 076: Grand theft audio
July 19, 2024.
6 months ago
Strange Loop Canon
People want competence, seemingly over everything else
All elections are about state capacity
2 months ago
All elections are about state capacity
Daniel Miessler
AI is About to Feel Like AGI, and You Need to Get Ready
I just wrote a piece similar to this last week, but this one drives the point home even more....
over a year ago
I just wrote a piece similar to this last week, but this one drives the point home even more. Basically, the current trajectory of AI, with all the art generation, the language models, etc., are about to become a whole lot more instruction and response based. What does that mean?...
One Useful Thing
What Apple's AI Tells Us: Experimental Models⁴
Siri versus the machine god?
7 months ago
Siri versus the machine god?
Daniel Miessler
News & Analysis | NO. 349
over a year ago
AI Snake Oil
What the executive order means for openness in AI
Good news on paper, but the devil is in the details
a year ago
Good news on paper, but the devil is in the details
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Sleepy Robot Baby
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE...
2 weeks ago
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March...
Artificial Ignorance
What are logprobs?
Something to do with logs and probabilities.
a year ago
Something to do with logs and probabilities.
One Useful Thing
The practical guide to using AI to do stuff
A resource for students in my classes (and other interested people).
a year ago
A resource for students in my classes (and other interested people).
Society's Backend
Backend Biweekly #1: Important AI Developments and ML Learning Resources
Updates on Apple, Mistral, and Microsoft and resources to build the GPT tokenizer, use MLX to train...
10 months ago
Updates on Apple, Mistral, and Microsoft and resources to build the GPT tokenizer, use MLX to train models, and benchmark LLMs
The Berkeley...
Designing Societally Beneficial Reinforcement Learning Systems
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is transitioning from a research field focused on game playing to...
over a year ago
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is transitioning from a research field focused on game playing to a technology with real-world applications. Notable examples include DeepMind’s work on controlling a nuclear reactor or on improving Youtube video compression, or Tesla attempting...
IEEE Spectrum
Detachable Robotic Hand Crawls Around on Finger-Legs
When we think of grasping robots, we think of manipulators of some sort on the ends of arms of some...
3 months ago
When we think of grasping robots, we think of manipulators of some sort on the ends of arms of some sort. Because of course we do—that’s how (most of us) are built, and that’s the mindset with which we have consequently optimized the world around us. But one of the great things...
One Useful Thing
What happens when AI reads a book 🤖📖
And some prompts that might be useful when it does.
a year ago
And some prompts that might be useful when it does.
AI Snake Oil
People keep anthropomorphizing AI. Here’s why
Companies and journalists both contribute to the confusion
a year ago
Companies and journalists both contribute to the confusion
Society's Backend
What it's Like to Work in AI and Advice from 10 AI Professionals
I asked 10 AI professionals 4 questions about their work in AI and the qualifications required for...
2 months ago
I asked 10 AI professionals 4 questions about their work in AI and the qualifications required for their job
fast.ai
AI and Power: The Ethical Challenges of Automation, Centralization, and Scale
Moving AI ethics beyond explainability and fairness to empowerment and justice
a year ago
Moving AI ethics beyond explainability and fairness to empowerment and justice
Artificial Ignorance
Looking a gift llama in the mouth
How Llama 3.1 uniquely leverages Meta's business model (and why we should be a little bit cynical...
6 months ago
How Llama 3.1 uniquely leverages Meta's business model (and why we should be a little bit cynical about it)
Sam Altman
Please Fund More Science
Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health,...
over a year ago
Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal.
Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 046: AI has a CSAM problem
December 22, 2023.
a year ago
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 084: Strawberry / o1
September 13, 2024.
4 months ago
AI Snake Oil
Three Ideas for Regulating Generative AI
Policy input to the federal government from a Stanford-Princeton team
a year ago
Policy input to the federal government from a Stanford-Princeton team
AI Snake Oil
Is AI-generated disinformation a threat to democracy?
An essay on the future of generative AI on social media
a year ago
An essay on the future of generative AI on social media
Strange Loop Canon
Mind the Gap
from empire to umpire
a year ago
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Unitree Talent Awakening
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE...
3 weeks ago
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA,...
Artificial Ignorance
Jevons Paradox and the future of programming
Supply and demand in the Age of AI.
10 months ago
Supply and demand in the Age of AI.
Artificial Ignorance
Dealing with AI fatigue
Notes for myself, and maybe you too.
11 months ago
Notes for myself, and maybe you too.
One Useful Thing
On-boarding your AI Intern
There's a somewhat weird alien who wants to work for free for you. You should probably get started.
a year ago
There's a somewhat weird alien who wants to work for free for you. You should probably get started.
AI Snake Oil
I set up a ChatGPT voice interface for my 3-year old. Here’s how it went.
Chatbots are likely to revive familiar debates about kids and apps
a year ago
Chatbots are likely to revive familiar debates about kids and apps
Artificial Ignorance
From Stable Diffusion to Stable Everything
Inside Stability AI's roster of AI models.
8 months ago
Inside Stability AI's roster of AI models.
Matt Mazur
Running Mistral 8x7Bs Mixture of Experts on a Macbook
Below are the steps I used to get Mistral 8x7Bs Mixture of Experts (MOE) model running locally on my...
a year ago
Below are the steps I used to get Mistral 8x7Bs Mixture of Experts (MOE) model running locally on my Macbook (with its Apple M2 chip and 24 GB of memory). Here’s a great overview of the model for anyone interested in learning more. Short version: The Mistral “Mixtral” 8x7B 32k...
Made by Ollin
Mac Replacement Icons
A standardized, simplified, and beautiful icon set
over a year ago
A standardized, simplified, and beautiful icon set
Artificial Ignorance
Tutorial: How to streamline your writing process with Whisper and GPT-4
These Python scripts help me write 3x faster and go from loose ideas to first draft in minutes.
8 months ago
These Python scripts help me write 3x faster and go from loose ideas to first draft in minutes.
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