Artificial Ignorance
Lessons from 139 YC AI startups (S23)
The evolution of the AI landscape, and YC's Copilot era.
a year ago
The evolution of the AI landscape, and YC's Copilot era.
PromptArmor Blog
Coming soon
This is PromptArmor Blog.
a year ago
This is PromptArmor Blog.
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Extreme Off-Road
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 2024: 22–24 November...
Artificial Ignorance
How Shopify is making AI Magic
A case study on turning competitive advantages into useful AI.
a year ago
A case study on turning competitive advantages into useful AI.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 059: In̶f̶l̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ Microsoft AI
March 22, 2023.
9 months ago
Artificial Ignorance
Why now?
What's behind our current AI boom?
a year ago
What's behind our current AI boom?
Daniel Miessler
5 Things I’m Still Waiting for With the iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods
I just camped for the new lineup of Apple products, as I have every year since 2007, and I am pretty...
over a year ago
I just camped for the new lineup of Apple products, as I have every year since 2007, and I am pretty impressed. As many have said, this year was an incremental update. The iPhones look nearly identical. And so do the AirPods Pro 2. The exception was the Apple Watch Ultra, which...
Stories by Andrej...
Yes you should understand backprop
over a year ago
Stories by Andrej...
Virtual Reality: still not quite there, again.
over a year ago
Artificial Ignorance
The Chatbot Trap
Why AI products really need some better UX.
a month ago
Why AI products really need some better UX.
Rozado’s Visual...
Northern Awokening: Social-justice and prejudice-signifying language in Canadian news media
I have recently published a report with Aaron Wudrick from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute about...
a year ago
I have recently published a report with Aaron Wudrick from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute about changes in the language that the news media in Canada use. I have documented previously how in American news media mentions of terms that signify distinct forms of prejudice have...
Rozado’s Visual...
El desproporcionado número de referencias al machismo en los medios de comunicación españoles
Los medios de comunicación españoles constituyen una anomalía en comparación con sus homólogos...
a year ago
Los medios de comunicación españoles constituyen una anomalía en comparación con sus homólogos internacionales por su alto número de referencias al machismo que triplican a las de cualquier otro país
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...
10 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.
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
Daniel Miessler
NO. 358 | NEWS, ANALYSIS & DISCOVERY
🦃 We're doing our second-ever discount on UL Membership starting the day after Thanksgiving. But...
over a year ago
🦃 We're doing our second-ever discount on UL Membership starting the day after Thanksgiving. But that's a Friday, so I'm going to enable the discount link earlier. How early, and how much of a discount? You'll have to find out. If the link works before the date, then it's...
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
Should You Get a PhD?
The one good reason to do a PhD and two others that fall flat
2 months ago
The one good reason to do a PhD and two others that fall flat
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
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.
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...
Marcus on AI
PSA: Microsoft may be training on your private data without your knowledge
The Great Data Heist continues.
3 weeks ago
The Great Data Heist continues.
Daniel Miessler
GPT and Search
There’s a lot of talk about how GPT is going to take over search. Meaning, compete with or take down...
over a year ago
There’s a lot of talk about how GPT is going to take over search. Meaning, compete with or take down Google. I get the excitement there, but there are some pretty serious barriers to having this happen immediately. First, GPT is non-deterministic, meaning you can ask it the same...
Frank’s Ramblings
Vision Transformers are Overrated
Vision transformers (ViTs) have seen an incredible rise in the past four years. They have an obvious...
11 months ago
Vision transformers (ViTs) have seen an incredible rise in the past four years. They have an obvious upside: in a visual recognition setting, the receptive field of a pure ViT is effectively the entire image 1. In particular, vanilla ViTs maintain the quadratic time complexity...
One Useful Thing
Four Singularities for Research
The rise of AI is creating both crisis and opportunity
7 months ago
The rise of AI is creating both crisis and opportunity
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....
Sam Altman
Greg
A lot of people ask me what the ideal cofounder looks
like. I now have an answer: Greg...
over a year ago
A lot of people ask me what the ideal cofounder looks
like. I now have an answer: Greg Brockman.
Every successful startup I know has at least one person who
provides the force of will to make the startup happen. I’d thought a lot
about this in the abstract while advising YC...
One Useful Thing
On giving AI eyes and ears
AI can listen and see, with bigger implications than we might realize.
a year ago
AI can listen and see, with bigger implications than we might realize.
The Gradient
Do text embeddings perfectly encode text?
'Vec2text' can serve as a solution for accurately reverting embeddings back into text, thus...
9 months ago
'Vec2text' can serve as a solution for accurately reverting embeddings back into text, thus highlighting the urgent need for revisiting security protocols around embedded data.
Jascha’s blog
Neural network training makes beautiful fractals
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
...
10 months ago
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'G-1XJMTJ5KCK');
.md h2 {
font-size: 20px;
}
.vimeo-player {
position: relative;
width: 444px;
height: 444px;
...
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...
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
Distributing the future
A reminder that things take time.
6 months ago
A reminder that things take time.
AI Snake Oil
Will AI transform law?
The hype is not supported by current evidence
11 months ago
The hype is not supported by current evidence
Daniel Miessler
Using Custom Searches in Safari (in 2022)
I’ve just started using Safari again after being on Chrome for a while, and one of the things I miss...
over a year ago
I’ve just started using Safari again after being on Chrome for a while, and one of the things I miss most from Chrome is custom searches. There you can search Amazon directly from the address bar by doing: You can change the search prompts to be single letters like ‘a’ for...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 074: Amazon's Adept acquisition
July 5, 2024.
5 months ago
IEEE Spectrum
How a Robot Is Grabbing Fuel From a Fukushima Reactor
Thirteen years since a massive earthquake and tsunami struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power...
2 months ago
Thirteen years since a massive earthquake and tsunami struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in northern Japan, causing a loss of power, meltdowns and a major release of radioactive material, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) finally seems to be close to...
One Useful Thing
What people ask me most. Also, some answers.
A FAQ of sorts
a year ago
The Berkeley...
Koala: A Dialogue Model for Academic Research
In this post, we introduce Koala, a chatbot trained by fine-tuning Meta’s LLaMA on dialogue data...
a year ago
In this post, we introduce Koala, a chatbot trained by fine-tuning Meta’s LLaMA on dialogue data gathered from the web. We describe the dataset curation and training process of our model, and also present the results of a user study that compares our model to ChatGPT and...
One Useful Thing
The Present Future: AI's Impact Long Before Superintelligence
You can start to see the outlines of an AI future, for better and worse
a month ago
You can start to see the outlines of an AI future, for better and worse
Artificial Ignorance
The hidden side of Apple Intelligence
More than just another keynote recap.
6 months ago
More than just another keynote recap.
AI Snake Oil
Is AI progress slowing down?
Making sense of recent technology trends and claims
4 days ago
Making sense of recent technology trends and claims
Society's Backend
Machine Learning Infrastructure: The Bridge Between Software Engineering and AI
What makes machine learning infra so important and why I find it so interesting
a year ago
What makes machine learning infra so important and why I find it so interesting
Strange Loop Canon
AI bill vetoed; what's next?
Make AI regulations evidence based
2 months ago
Make AI regulations evidence based
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 040: GPTs
November 10, 2023.
a year ago
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”
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.”
9 months ago
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
Sam Altman
The Strength of Being Misunderstood
A founder recently asked me how to stop caring what other people think. I didn’t have an answer, and...
over a year ago
A founder recently asked me how to stop caring what other people think. I didn’t have an answer, and after reflecting on it more, I think it's the wrong question.
Almost everyone cares what someone thinks (though caring what everyone thinks is definitely a mistake), and it's...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 051: The Taylor Swift thing
January 26, 2024.
11 months ago
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...
Artificial Ignorance
10 of the most impactful AI stories of 2023
A quick look back on a very busy year in AI.
a year ago
A quick look back on a very busy year in AI.
One Useful Thing
Assigning AI: Seven Ways of Using AI in Class
Also prompts! And things to watch out for!
a year ago
Also prompts! And things to watch out for!
Society's Backend
An AI Revolution Isn't Coming - We're Already In It
A small showcase of companies using AI in ways that will change your life
a year ago
A small showcase of companies using AI in ways that will change your life
Sam Altman
US Digital Currency
I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is...
over a year ago
I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case we have seen work at scale so far). There was possibly a time when governments could have totally stopped it, but it feels like that’s in the rearview mirror.
...
One Useful Thing
15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to
Notes on the Practical Wisdom of AI Use
a week ago
Notes on the Practical Wisdom of AI Use
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?...
Artificial Ignorance
Honey, I joined a cabal
Or: Mainstream media still isn't great at covering tech and AI ideologies
6 months ago
Or: Mainstream media still isn't great at covering tech and AI ideologies
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Happy Holidays!
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE...
2 days 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
AI Roundup 026: AudioCraft
August 4, 2023
a year ago
Daniel Miessler
Stadia is Google’s Product Strategy
Few things in tech were more predictable than Stadia shutting down. Here’s what I wrote the week it...
over a year ago
Few things in tech were more predictable than Stadia shutting down. Here’s what I wrote the week it came out: Here’s what I said about it in 2021. And here’s my analysis of why this keeps happening: How I Knew Stadia Would Fail The overall reason for this is UI/UX in my opinion,...
Sam Altman
The United Slate
I would like to find and support a slate of candidates for the 2018 California elections, and also...
over a year ago
I would like to find and support a slate of candidates for the 2018 California elections, and also to find someone to run a ballot initiative focused on affordable housing in the state. A team of aligned people has a chance to make a real change.
I believe in creating prosperity...
Society's Backend
Positioning Myself: The Greatest Piece of Career Advice I've Ever Received
And how it changed my personal life too
12 months ago
And how it changed my personal life too
Artificial Ignorance
Dealing with AI fatigue
Notes for myself, and maybe you too.
10 months ago
Notes for myself, and maybe you too.
Weighty Thoughts
Why ChatGPT Strawberry o1 (and other LLMs) will Never be Good at Diagnosis
“Connectionist” vs. Knowledge-Based AI
2 months ago
“Connectionist” vs. Knowledge-Based AI
Strange Loop Canon
Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations
finding the new equilibrium for the next superpower
2 months ago
finding the new equilibrium for the next superpower
Artificial Ignorance
How to reverse engineer the Substack (or any!) web API
Building an unauthorized Substack client with Claude.
4 months ago
Building an unauthorized Substack client with Claude.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
Rozado’s Visual...
Which is the Wokest AI?
A Wokeness Ranking of LLMs
9 months ago
A Wokeness Ranking of LLMs
Weighty Thoughts
VC Office Hours
Talk to James Wang, author of Weighty Thoughts and General Partner of Creative Ventures
10 months ago
Talk to James Wang, author of Weighty Thoughts and General Partner of Creative Ventures
Weighty Thoughts
Consider the Llama
Are closed source AI models doomed?
4 months ago
Are closed source AI models doomed?
Matt Mazur
Running Mistral 7B Instruct on a Macbook
Similar to yesterday’s post on running Mistral 8x7Bs Mixture of Experts (MOE) model, I wanted to...
a year ago
Similar to yesterday’s post on running Mistral 8x7Bs Mixture of Experts (MOE) model, I wanted to document the steps I took to run Mistral’s 7B-Instruct-v0.2 model on a Mac for anyone else interested in playing around with it. Unlike yesterday’s post though, this 7B Instruct...
Society's Backend
Always Be Networking
The things you should know about effective networking
a year ago
The things you should know about effective networking
Rozado’s Visual...
Frecuencia de términos en el periódico generalista más leído de España
Frecuencia de términos en el periódico generalista más leído de España: El País Twitter post...
over a year ago
Frecuencia de términos en el periódico generalista más leído de España: El País Twitter post Verification of integrity of frequency counts: https://zenodo.org/record/5674590
Society's Backend
LLM-as-a-Judge, Instruction Pretraining, Solving Benchmarks Instead of Real-World ML Problems, and...
Weekly updates and resources 7/22/24
5 months ago
Weekly updates and resources 7/22/24
Stories by Andrej...
A Peek at Trends in Machine Learning
over a year ago
One Useful Thing
Power and Weirdness: How to Use Bing AI
Bing AI is a huge leap over ChatGPT, but you have to learn its quirks
a year ago
Bing AI is a huge leap over ChatGPT, but you have to learn its quirks
Weighty Thoughts
One Definite Sign of a Bad Startup Idea
If you can’t tell anyone about your startup idea, it's not a good idea
over a year ago
If you can’t tell anyone about your startup idea, it's not a good idea
Weighty Thoughts
Apple Wins
Apple Intelligence and aggregation puts Apple in a dominant AI position
6 months ago
Apple Intelligence and aggregation puts Apple in a dominant AI position
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
a month ago
Society's Backend Reading List 11-04-2024
Daniel Miessler
The 2 Current Major AI Bottlenecks
I’ve been going hardcore on using GPT to create essays, reports, and other kinds of analysis. I’ve...
a year ago
I’ve been going hardcore on using GPT to create essays, reports, and other kinds of analysis. I’ve had tons of success with it, and it’s given me a clear view of current limitations with the current tech. I’m not complaining. This stuff is brand-new. Here are the current...
Society's Backend
OpenAI’s Blunder is a Loss for the ML Community
The timeline and why OpenAI’s actions are a big deal
7 months ago
The timeline and why OpenAI’s actions are a big deal
Weighty Thoughts
Software Engineering is Doomed
Or is it?
5 months ago
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 week ago
A data-driven exploration uncovers disparities. Are they shaped by editorial choices or broader societal/historical dynamics?
Weighty Thoughts
China's AI Journey
Talking to Jordan Schneider from ChinaTalk about China's technological ascent
6 months ago
Talking to Jordan Schneider from ChinaTalk about China's technological ascent
fast.ai
From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion
We’ve released our new course with over 30 hours of video content.
a year ago
We’ve released our new course with over 30 hours of video content.
Weighty Thoughts
The Fall of Data Moats
AI actually makes most data moats weaker
a year ago
AI actually makes most data moats weaker
AI Snake Oil
We Looked at 78 Election Deepfakes. Political Misinformation is not an AI Problem.
Technology Isn’t the Problem—or the Solution.
a week ago
Technology Isn’t the Problem—or the Solution.
One Useful Thing
Signs and Portents
Some hints about what the next year of AI looks like
11 months ago
Some hints about what the next year of AI looks like
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 —
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 064: Big Tech's small models
April 26, 2024.
7 months ago
Weighty Thoughts
CUDA is Still a Giant Moat for NVIDIA
Despite everyone’s focus on hardware, the software of AI is what protects NVIDIA
9 months ago
Despite everyone’s focus on hardware, the software of AI is what protects NVIDIA
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
Weighty Thoughts
Startup Valuation Made Simple(r) - Working Backwards
Counterintuitively, start from how much money you need
over a year ago
Counterintuitively, start from how much money you need
IEEE Spectrum
Robot Photographer Takes the Perfect Picture
Finding it hard to get the perfect angle for your shot? PhotoBot can take the picture for you. Tell...
4 weeks ago
Finding it hard to get the perfect angle for your shot? PhotoBot can take the picture for you. Tell it what you want the photo to look like, and your robot photographer will present you with references to mimic. Pick your favorite, and PhotoBot—a robot arm with a camera—will...
One Useful Thing
Democratizing the future of education
We are all EdTech designers, now
a year ago
We are all EdTech designers, now
Rozado’s Visual...
Is climate change 100 times more threatening than gain-of-function research?
Mentions of climate change in news media vastly outnumber other existential threats
a year ago
Mentions of climate change in news media vastly outnumber other existential threats
Marcus on AI
A new AI scaling law shell game?
Scaling laws were supposed to be, well, laws.
3 weeks ago
Scaling laws were supposed to be, well, laws.
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
The Berkeley...
How to Evaluate Jailbreak Methods: A Case Study with the StrongREJECT Benchmark
When we began studying jailbreak evaluations, we found a fascinating paper claiming that you could...
3 months ago
When we began studying jailbreak evaluations, we found a fascinating paper claiming that you could jailbreak frontier LLMs simply by translating forbidden prompts into obscure languages. Excited by this result, we attempted to reproduce it and found something unexpected.
The...
One Useful Thing
Reshaping the tree: rebuilding organizations for AI
Technological change brings organizational change.
a year ago
Technological change brings organizational change.
Made by Ollin
Acapella Extraction with ConvNets
A working prototype
over a year ago
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
Society's Backend
AI and Software Reading List 4: State of the Job Market, Apple's Private Cloud Compute Released for...
Society's Backend Reading List 10-28-2024
a month ago
Society's Backend Reading List 10-28-2024
Marcus on AI
ChatGPT, at Age Two
The bullshit just keeps on coming.
3 weeks ago
The bullshit just keeps on coming.
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...
One Useful Thing
Not much is changing, a lot is changing
OpenAI, Microsoft, and the OpenOffspring
a year ago
OpenAI, Microsoft, and the OpenOffspring
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...
2 months ago
Watch now | If you’ve ever wanted to level up your AI prompting skills, this is the workshop for you.
Rozado’s Visual...
The Political Biases of GPT-4
Things are not always what they seem
a year ago
Things are not always what they seem
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.
Artificial Ignorance
Small newsletters, big ideas
A subscriber showcase full of hidden gems on Substack.
6 days ago
A subscriber showcase full of hidden gems on Substack.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 096: Happy Shipmas
December 6, 2024.
2 weeks ago
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 041: Lyria
November 17, 2023.
a year ago
One Useful Thing
My class required AI. Here's what I've learned so far.
(Spoiler alert: it has been very successful, but there are some lessons to be learned)
a year ago
(Spoiler alert: it has been very successful, but there are some lessons to be learned)
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
7 months ago
And a step-by-step guide to train a machine learning model on your Mac
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
2 months ago
Society's Backend Reading List 10-14-2024
Artificial Ignorance
GPTs won't make you rich
But they'll make you more productive.
11 months ago
But they'll make you more productive.
Matt Mazur
Is the ChatGPT API Refusing to Summarize Academic Papers? Not so fast.
Yesterday on X, I shared a post about some responses I was getting from the ChatGPT 3.5 API...
11 months ago
Yesterday on X, I shared a post about some responses I was getting from the ChatGPT 3.5 API indicating that it was refusing to summarize arXiv papers: There has been a lot of discussion recently about the perceived decrease in the quality of ChatGPT’s responses and seeing...
One Useful Thing
When you give a Claude a mouse
Some quick impressions of an actual agent
2 months ago
Some quick impressions of an actual agent
AI Snake Oil
Model alignment protects against accidental harms, not intentional ones
The hand wringing about failures of model alignment is misguided
a year ago
The hand wringing about failures of model alignment is misguided
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Swiss-Mile Robot vs. Humans
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 2024: 22–24 November...
Society's Backend
OpenAI's Strawberry May Enhance AI Reasoning, Optimization of Vision Language Models, Info on...
Weekly updates and resources 7/15/24
5 months ago
Weekly updates and resources 7/15/24
The Gradient
What's Missing From LLM Chatbots: A Sense of Purpose
LLM-based chatbots’ capabilities have been advancing every month. These improvements are mostly...
3 months ago
LLM-based chatbots’ capabilities have been advancing every month. These improvements are mostly measured by benchmarks like MMLU, HumanEval, and MATH (e.g. sonnet 3.5, gpt-4o). However, as these measures get more and more saturated, is user experience increasing in proportion to...
AI Snake Oil
What is algorithmic amplification and why should we care?
A symposium and a primer on social media recommendation algorithms
a year ago
A symposium and a primer on social media recommendation algorithms
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.
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...
IEEE Spectrum
It's Surprisingly Easy to Jailbreak LLM-Driven Robots
large language models (LLMs) have exploded in popularity, leading a number of companies to explore...
a month ago
large language models (LLMs) have exploded in popularity, leading a number of companies to explore LLM-driven robots. However, a new study now reveals an automated way to hack into such machines with 100 percent success. By circumventing safety guardrails, researchers could...
AI Snake Oil
A misleading open letter about sci-fi AI dangers ignores the real risks
Misinformation, labor impact, and safety are all risks. But not in the way the letter implies.
a year ago
Misinformation, labor impact, and safety are all risks. But not in the way the letter implies.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 085: You win some, you Newsom
September 20, 2024.
3 months ago
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. >...
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...
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...
Society's Backend
Founder Mode, How AI Impacts Education, Diffusion Models As Real-Time Game Engines, and More
Machine learning resources and updates 2024-09-03
3 months ago
Machine learning resources and updates 2024-09-03
Society's Backend
One Year of Society's Backend
The lessons I've learned along the way
4 months ago
The lessons I've learned along the way
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...
The Gradient
A Brief Overview of Gender Bias in AI
A brief overview and discussion on gender bias in AI
8 months ago
A brief overview and discussion on gender bias in AI
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 048: The Robot Constitution
January 5, 2024.
11 months ago
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
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...
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
CONFIRMED: LLMs have indeed reached a point of diminishing returns
Science, sociology, and the likely financial collapse of the Generative AI bubble
a month ago
Science, sociology, and the likely financial collapse of the Generative AI bubble
Society's Backend
Backend Biweekly #3: 97 Updates and Resources
Huge Nvidia Updates, Gemini Hackathon for Money, and more
8 months ago
Huge Nvidia Updates, Gemini Hackathon for Money, and more
The Gradient
An Introduction to the Problems of AI Consciousness
Once considered a forbidden topic in the AI community, discussions around the concept of AI...
a year ago
Once considered a forbidden topic in the AI community, discussions around the concept of AI consciousness are now taking center stage, marking a significant shift since the current AI resurgence began over a decade ago.
Society's Backend
AI Reading List 3: Meta's Self-Taught Evaluator, AI for Cancer Diagnosis, and a Technical...
Society's Backend Reading List 10-21-2024
2 months ago
Society's Backend Reading List 10-21-2024
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
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...
One Useful Thing
The Best Available Human Standard
What are the imperatives of the upside?
a year ago
What are the imperatives of the upside?
Artificial Ignorance
Who in their right mind would do an AI hardware startup
From megaFLOPS to mega flops.
8 months ago
From megaFLOPS to mega flops.
AI Snake Oil
Is Avoiding Extinction from AI Really an Urgent Priority?
The history of technology suggests that the greatest risks come not from the tech, but from the...
a year ago
The history of technology suggests that the greatest risks come not from the tech, but from the people who control 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...
Sam Altman
What I Heard From Trump Supporters
After the election, I decided to talk to 100 Trump voters from around
the country. I went to the...
over a year ago
After the election, I decided to talk to 100 Trump voters from around
the country. I went to the middle of the
country, the middle of the state, and talked to many online.
This was a surprisingly interesting and helpful experience—I highly
recommend it. With three exceptions,...
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?
One Useful Thing
Something New: On OpenAI's "Strawberry" and Reasoning
Solving hard problems in new ways
3 months ago
Solving hard problems in new ways
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...
2 months ago
Providing a technical perspective for a more educated assessment of a complaint I hear quite frequently
Sam Altman
A Clarification
I made a point in this post inelegantly in a way that was
easy to misunderstand, so I’d like to...
over a year ago
I made a point in this post inelegantly in a way that was
easy to misunderstand, so I’d like to clarify it.
I didn’t mean that we need to tolerate brilliant homophobic
jerks in the lab so that we can have scientific progress.
Although there are famous...
Society's Backend
The State of AI in China
Is China winning the race to AGI?
5 months ago
Is China winning the race to AGI?
fast.ai
A new old kind of R&D lab
Answer.AI is a new kind of AI R&D lab which creates practical end-user products based on...
a year ago
Answer.AI is a new kind of AI R&D lab which creates practical end-user products based on foundational research breakthroughs.
Society's Backend
Backend Biweekly #2: 112 Total Updates and Resources
Details on Metas training clusters, analysis of ML competitions in 2023, AI's impact on water...
9 months ago
Details on Metas training clusters, analysis of ML competitions in 2023, AI's impact on water resources, and more
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,...
The Berkeley...
Virtual Personas for Language Models via an Anthology of Backstories
Anthology, a method for conditioning LLMs to representative, consistent, and diverse virtual...
a month ago
Anthology, a method for conditioning LLMs to representative, consistent, and diverse virtual personas by generating and utilizing naturalistic backstories with rich details of individual values and experience.
-->
We introduce Anthology, a method for conditioning LLMs to...
One Useful Thing
One sentence.
Prompting for maximum impact (and why that is a bad idea)
a year ago
Prompting for maximum impact (and why that is a bad idea)
Daniel Miessler
News, Analysis, and Discovery | NO. 356
SECURITY NEWS TikTok has now admitted, after denying last week, that Chinese staff can in fact read...
over a year ago
SECURITY NEWS TikTok has now admitted, after denying last week, that Chinese staff can in fact read European TikTok data. Pressure is increasing across the US government to outright ban the app, but it's quickly becoming national infrastructure so many young people. MORE |...
AI Snake Oil
New paper: AI agents that matter
Rethinking AI agent benchmarking and evaluation
5 months ago
Rethinking AI agent benchmarking and evaluation
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...
5 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?
The Gradient
Deep learning for single-cell sequencing: a microscope to see the diversity of cells
On the the pivotal role that Deep Learning has played as a key enabler for advancing single-cell...
11 months ago
On the the pivotal role that Deep Learning has played as a key enabler for advancing single-cell sequencing technologies.
Rozado’s Visual...
An Analysis of AI Political Preferences from a European Perspective
Introduction
a month ago
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...
Society's Backend
Weekly Backend #4: 62 Total Resources
Apple’s LLM OpenELM, GPT-4-Turbo, Phi-3, Grok-1.5 Vision, and more
7 months ago
Apple’s LLM OpenELM, GPT-4-Turbo, Phi-3, Grok-1.5 Vision, and more
Artificial Ignorance
Tutorial: How to chat with your documents
A step-by-step guide to doing Q&A with your data, using LlamaIndex and OpenAI.
a year ago
A step-by-step guide to doing Q&A with your data, using LlamaIndex and OpenAI.
Rozado’s Visual...
The Academic Literature and its Increasing Emphasis on Prejudice and Social Justice
Published article Twitter thread In previous scholarly work (here and here), I documented a marked...
over a year ago
Published article Twitter thread In previous scholarly work (here and here), I documented a marked increase of references to prejudice in US, UK and Spanish news media content. The work summarized here investigates the prevalence dynamics of prejudice-denoting terms in 175...
Artificial Ignorance
How to talk to your family about AI this Thanksgiving
A handy guide for your uncle's burning questions.
a year ago
A handy guide for your uncle's burning questions.
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...
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...
Daniel Miessler
UL NO. 354 | THE NEWS & ANALYSIS SERIES
SECURITY NEWS The US has implemented a number of aggressive export controls to stop China from...
over a year ago
SECURITY NEWS The US has implemented a number of aggressive export controls to stop China from attaining advanced semiconductors. And now it looks like the bans will be expanded to quantum computing and AI as well. NYTIMES | MY ANALYSIS BELOW It appears Bytedance had a plan to...
One Useful Thing
An AI Haunted World
Intelligence, everywhere.
a year ago
Intelligence, everywhere.
Rozado’s Visual...
Is The Great Awokening Really Winding Down? Part II: Evidence from News Media
Others (here, here and here) have argued previously that The Great Awokening might be winding down....
a year ago
Others (here, here and here) have argued previously that The Great Awokening might be winding down. I have shown before some preliminary evidence from Twitter content about how Great Awokening terminology with negative connotations are indeed down but those with positive...
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.
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
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...
Society's Backend
Why Machine Learning Systems Misbehave
And what makes them so difficult to work with
5 months ago
And what makes them so difficult to work with
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...
Strange Loop Canon
People want competence, seemingly over everything else
All elections are about state capacity
a month ago
All elections are about state capacity
Andrej Karpathy blog
Deep Neural Nets: 33 years ago and 33 years from now
.post-header h1 {
font-size: 35px;
}
.post pre,
.post code {
background-color: #fcfcfc;
...
over a year ago
.post-header h1 {
font-size: 35px;
}
.post pre,
.post code {
background-color: #fcfcfc;
font-size: 13px; /* make code smaller for this post... */
}
The Yann LeCun et al. (1989) paper Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition is I believe of some...
One Useful Thing
"Do not fear AI, puny humans... that is not meant as a threat."
What we can learn from a completely AI written & illustrated lecture
a year ago
What we can learn from a completely AI written & illustrated lecture
Artificial Ignorance
AI's invisible instructions
What meme prompts can teach us about better interface design.
a month ago
What meme prompts can teach us about better interface design.
AI Snake Oil
Tech policy is only frustrating 90% of the time
That’s what makes it worthwhile
8 months ago
That’s what makes it worthwhile
Artificial Ignorance
Has YC hit peak AI? (F24)
The latest batch is up to 86% AI startups.
2 weeks ago
The latest batch is up to 86% AI startups.
Sam Altman
The Virus
Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to...
over a year ago
Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to face a global tragedy—hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.
I hope that society views this as a warning for the future. Covid-19 is bad, but only a warm-up. I think it’s...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 082: System prompts
August 30, 2024.
3 months ago
One Useful Thing
Magic for English Majors
Programming in prose in an AI-haunted world
a year ago
Programming in prose in an AI-haunted world
Artificial Ignorance
Bridging AI and human creativity
A conversation with Harrison Telyan, co-founder of NUMI.
9 months ago
A conversation with Harrison Telyan, co-founder of NUMI.
Artificial Ignorance
The Industrial Content Revolution
A fundamental change in the structure the internet.
a year ago
A fundamental change in the structure the internet.
Weighty Thoughts
I'm writing a book!
Why I've been gone over a month, and how you can help
3 weeks ago
Why I've been gone over a month, and how you can help
Andrej Karpathy blog
What a Deep Neural Network thinks about your #selfie
Convolutional Neural Networks are great: they recognize things, places and people in your personal...
over a year ago
Convolutional Neural Networks are great: they recognize things, places and people in your personal photos, signs, people and lights in self-driving cars, crops, forests and traffic in aerial imagery, various anomalies in medical images and all kinds of other useful things. But...
Society's Backend
Weekly Backend #5: 55 Resources
The inner workings of transformers, Machine Learning Q and AI, machine learning classifies harmful...
7 months ago
The inner workings of transformers, Machine Learning Q and AI, machine learning classifies harmful viruses, and more
Daniel Miessler
Reverse Transcription
There are dozens of reasons to be bullish on AI right now, especially in the GPT space where we have...
over a year ago
There are dozens of reasons to be bullish on AI right now, especially in the GPT space where we have AIs producing so much extraordinary art. But I’m excited about something else that we’re naturally evolving GPT into, which I’m calling Reverse Transcription. A bit of background...
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
Rozado’s Visual...
Out-of-office Donald Trump still more prominent in news media content than the current U.S....
In 2019, I helped my colleague Musa al-Gharbi document the extraordinary prominence of Donald Trump...
a year ago
In 2019, I helped my colleague Musa al-Gharbi document the extraordinary prominence of Donald Trump in news media content (see here). I have recently updated that previous analysis. Briefly stated, no U.S. president in recent history has received a similar amount of media...
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 Zoology: Why are there so many animal models?
Inside the emerging model menagerie.
a year ago
Inside the emerging model menagerie.
Strange Loop Canon
Whither Utopia?
The mystery of why we don't dream of building perfect societies anymore
6 months ago
The mystery of why we don't dream of building perfect societies anymore
The Gradient
What Do LLMs Know About Linguistics? It Depends on How You Ask
On the phenomenon of LLM sensitivity to prompting choices through two core linguistic tasks and...
a year ago
On the phenomenon of LLM sensitivity to prompting choices through two core linguistic tasks and categorize how specific prompting choices can affect the model's behavior.
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."
Frank’s Ramblings
a16z Blogs Are Just Glorified Marketing
… glorified marketing for portfolio companies, that is
I came across one of a16z’s blog posts on...
a year ago
… glorified marketing for portfolio companies, that is
I came across one of a16z’s blog posts on Hacker News today, titled Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications. For folks who didn’t catch it, here’s the tl;dr:
The emerging LLM stack is composed of several elements centered...
Daniel Miessler
Your Experience is Your Creativity
Creativity is usually described as an external force that graces you with inspiration. Something...
a year ago
Creativity is usually described as an external force that graces you with inspiration. Something that you have to open yourself to—that you have to allow in. But creativity is more like an inner forge of your past, perspectives, and passions. It’s not something you let in; it’s...
Weighty Thoughts
What’s coming next for AI in 2024
A long overdue VC apocalypse and the birth of the first real AI companies
11 months ago
A long overdue VC apocalypse and the birth of the first real AI companies
One Useful Thing
On holding back the strange AI tide
There is no way to stop the disruption. We need to channel it instead
a year ago
There is no way to stop the disruption. We need to channel it instead
Frank’s Ramblings
My Experience Living and Working in China, Part II: COVID Stories
In this four-part article, I’ll go over some of the lessons I learned living and doing business in...
over a year ago
In this four-part article, I’ll go over some of the lessons I learned living and doing business in China’s tech industry. During my time in China, I’ve led a team of 10+ engineers to develop a location-based IoT and sensing platform, co-founded an open-source project called...
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
Artificial Ignorance
Milestones, motivations, and miscellany
Some thoughts on the future of this newsletter.
5 months ago
Some thoughts on the future of this newsletter.
Sam Altman
How To Be Successful
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of...
over a year ago
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter.
Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier...
Artificial Ignorance
How Intercom is transforming customer support with AI
A conversation with Fergal Reid, VP of AI at Intercom.
8 months ago
A conversation with Fergal Reid, VP of AI at Intercom.
AI Snake Oil
Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle
How AI hype leads to flawed research that fuels more hype
6 months ago
How AI hype leads to flawed research that fuels more hype
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 045: Google's just getting started
December 15, 2023.
a year ago
IEEE Spectrum
5 Questions for Robotics Legend Ruzena Bajcsy
Ruzena Bajcsy is one of the founders of the modern field of robotics. With an education in...
3 weeks ago
Ruzena Bajcsy is one of the founders of the modern field of robotics. With an education in electrical engineering in Slovakia, followed by a Ph.D. at Stanford, Bajcsy was the first woman to join the engineering faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the first, she...
Daniel Miessler
AI Art Will Push the Top 1% to Human Artists
One effect I think we’ll see from all this AI-generated art is magnified status for those who insist...
over a year ago
One effect I think we’ll see from all this AI-generated art is magnified status for those who insist on the opposite, i.e., manual, human art. The more manual the better. The more human the better. Ideally there’d only be one of whatever you have, and it’d only be yours. Why is...
AI Snake Oil
Generative AI’s end-run around copyright won’t be resolved by the courts
Output similarity is a distraction
11 months ago
Output similarity is a distraction
AI Snake Oil
Does the UK’s liver transplant matching algorithm systematically exclude younger patients?
Seemingly minor technical decisions can have life-or-death effects
a month ago
Seemingly minor technical decisions can have life-or-death effects
The Gradient
Interpretability Creationism
On “interpretability creationism” – interpretability methods that only look at the final state of...
a year ago
On “interpretability creationism” – interpretability methods that only look at the final state of the model and ignore its evolution over the course of training
The Berkeley...
Rethinking Human-in-the-Loop for Artificial Augmented Intelligence
How do we build and evaluate an AI system for real-world applications? In most AI research, the...
over a year ago
How do we build and evaluate an AI system for real-world applications? In most AI research, the evaluation of AI methods involves a training-validation-testing process. The experiments usually stop when the models have good testing performance on the reported datasets because...
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.
One Useful Thing
Change blindness
21 months later
4 months ago
Andrej Karpathy blog
Biohacking Lite
Throughout my life I never paid too much attention to health, exercise, diet or nutrition. I knew...
over a year ago
Throughout my life I never paid too much attention to health, exercise, diet or nutrition. I knew that you’re supposed to get some exercise and eat vegetables or something, but it stopped at that (“mom said”-) level of abstraction. I also knew that I can probably get away with...
fast.ai
GPT 4 and the Uncharted Territories of Language
Language is a source of limitation and liberation. GPT 4 pushes this idea to the extreme by giving...
a year ago
Language is a source of limitation and liberation. GPT 4 pushes this idea to the extreme by giving us access to unlimited language.
Marcus on AI
Don’t Ride This Bike! Generative AI’s persistent trouble with compositionality and parts
When the text-to-image AI generation system DALL-E2 was released in April 2022, the two of us,...
a week ago
When the text-to-image AI generation system DALL-E2 was released in April 2022, the two of us, together with Scott Aaronson, ran some informal experiments to probe its abilities.
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...
Daniel Miessler
NO. 368 | ChinaBalloons, CustomGPT, 90s++…
✅ Please add this address to your "safe senders" or equivalent within your mail client. It'll...
a year ago
✅ Please add this address to your "safe senders" or equivalent within your mail client. It'll prevent the email from occasionally descending into the void. SECURITY The US shot down a Chinese spy balloon. They gathered the debris from the water it fell into, and it's currently...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 058: Devin and SIMA
March 15, 2023.
9 months ago
The Berkeley...
Generating 3D Molecular Conformers via Equivariant Coarse-Graining and Aggregated Attention
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Figure 1: CoarsenConf architecture.
(I) The encoder $q_\phi(z| X, \mathcal{R})$ takes the...
a year ago
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Figure 1: CoarsenConf architecture.
(I) The encoder $q_\phi(z| X, \mathcal{R})$ takes the fine-grained (FG) ground truth conformer $X$, RDKit approximate conformer $\mathcal{R}$ , and coarse-grained (CG) conformer $\mathcal{C}$ as inputs (derived from $X$ and a predefined...
Marcus on AI
Generative AI’s Continuing Copyright Problems, an Essay in Memory of Suchir Balaji, 1998 - 2024
In early November, I had a stimulating Zoom call with a former OpenAI employee and Berkeley graduate...
a week ago
In early November, I had a stimulating Zoom call with a former OpenAI employee and Berkeley graduate named Suchir Balaji, who had just left OpenAI.
Artificial Ignorance
The SearchGPT Paradigm
What people (still) fundamentally misunderstand about AI search.
4 months ago
What people (still) fundamentally misunderstand about AI search.
One Useful Thing
What OpenAI did
A new model opens up new possibilities
7 months ago
A new model opens up new possibilities
IEEE Spectrum
Zen and the Art of Aibo Engineering
Sony’s team made that happen. And since Aibo’s debut, the company has sold
more than 170,000 of...
a week ago
Sony’s team made that happen. And since Aibo’s debut, the company has sold
more than 170,000 of the cute little quadrupeds—a huge number considering their price of several thousand dollars each. From the start, Aibo could express a range of simulated emotions and learn through...
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 049: Down the Rabbit hole
January 12, 2023.
11 months ago
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
Figure title. Figure caption. This image is centered and set to 50%
page width. -->
A longstanding goal of the field of robot learning has been to create generalist agents that can perform tasks for humans. Natural language has...
Society's Backend
Run Your Own Race
What Bluey can teach us about machine learning
8 months ago
What Bluey can teach us about machine learning
AI Snake Oil
Does ChatGPT have a liberal bias?
A new paper making this claim has many flaws. But the question merits research
a year ago
A new paper making this claim has many flaws. But the question merits 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
Society's Backend
Top 10 Machine Learning Resources and Updates 06/21/2024
The fastest way to get up to speed on ML fundamentals, Meta releases new models, NVIDIA releases...
6 months ago
The fastest way to get up to speed on ML fundamentals, Meta releases new models, NVIDIA releases open models, Google generates audio for video, and more
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 076: Grand theft audio
July 19, 2024.
5 months ago
Society's Backend
Godmother of AI Warns Against Regulation, Apple Intelligence System Prompts, Faster and Cheaper AI,...
Machine learning resources and updates 8/12/2024
4 months ago
Machine learning resources and updates 8/12/2024
Marcus on AI
o3, AGI, the art of the demo, and what you can expect in 2025
OpenAI’s new model was revealed yesterday; its most fervent believers think AGI has already arrived....
20 hours ago
OpenAI’s new model was revealed yesterday; its most fervent believers think AGI has already arrived. Here’s what you should pay attention to in the coming year.
Sam Altman
Reinforcement Learning Progress
Today, OpenAI released a new result. We used PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization), a general...
over a year ago
Today, OpenAI released a new result. We used PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization), a general reinforcement learning algorithm invented by OpenAI, to train a team of 5 agents to play Dota and beat semi-pros.
This is the game that to me feels closest to the real world and complex...
Artificial Ignorance
Workshop: Enough GPT To Be Dangerous with Sairam Sundaresan
Have you ever wondered what’s actually happening inside ChatGPT and Claude, but found “explainers”...
a month ago
Have you ever wondered what’s actually happening inside ChatGPT and Claude, but found “explainers” too complex or technical?
Artificial Ignorance
I gave ChatGPT access to my Gmail
I'm sure this will end well.
a year ago
I'm sure this will end well.
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 054: Ten million tokens
February 16, 2024.
10 months ago
Society's Backend
Clarifying DEI
What makes DEI important and where it fails
11 months ago
What makes DEI important and where it fails
Society's Backend
Weekly Backend #7: 39 Resources and Updates
GPT-4o, Google I/O, Fugaku LLM, Prep for Machine Learning Interviews, and more
7 months ago
GPT-4o, Google I/O, Fugaku LLM, Prep for Machine Learning Interviews, and more
Rozado’s Visual...
The political orientation of the ChatGPT AI system
Applying the Pew Research Political Typology Quiz to a state-of-the-art AI Language model
over a year ago
Applying the Pew Research Political Typology Quiz to a state-of-the-art AI Language model
Weighty Thoughts
Open AI's Valuation and a Favor to Ask
A guest post and an in-person panel
4 months ago
A guest post and an in-person panel
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,...
3 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...
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
5 months ago
The top 10 most important updates of last week: 7/8/24
AI Snake Oil
Four more things we worked on in 2022
We had a busy 2022. Here are a few things we worked on but didn’t cover here.
a year ago
We had a busy 2022. Here are a few things we worked on but didn’t cover here.
The Gradient
We Need Positive Visions for AI Grounded in Wellbeing
Introduction
Imagine yourself a decade ago, jumping directly into the present shock of conversing...
4 months ago
Introduction
Imagine yourself a decade ago, jumping directly into the present shock of conversing naturally with an encyclopedic AI that crafts images, writes code, and debates philosophy. Won’t this technology almost certainly transform society — and hasn’t AI’s impact on us so...
AI Snake Oil
Starting reading the AI Snake Oil book online today
The book will be published on September 24
3 months ago
The book will be published on September 24
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...
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
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 095: QwQ
November 29, 2024.
3 weeks ago
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 032: The Insight Forum
September 15, 2023.
a year ago
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
Andrej Karpathy blog
Short Story on AI: Forward Pass
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text-align: justify;
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background-color:...
over a year ago
p {
text-align: justify;
}
.post pre, .post code {
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background-color: #eee;
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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
JAX is for More Than Just Machine Learning
What JAX is and its potential applications
6 months ago
What JAX is and its potential applications
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...
Society's Backend
All Machine Learning Resources and Updates 7/8/24
Everything I've been reading
5 months ago
Everything I've been reading
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...
5 months ago
How Llama 3.1 uniquely leverages Meta's business model (and why we should be a little bit cynical about it)
Rozado’s Visual...
The Increasing Prominence of Prejudice and Social Justice Rhetoric in UK News Media
I have recently published a report with Matthew Goodwin about the increasing prominence of prejudice...
over a year ago
I have recently published a report with Matthew Goodwin about the increasing prominence of prejudice and social justice rhetoric in UK news media. Recent years have seen considerable debate about the rise of political polarization in British society. Specifically, over the last...
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...
9 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?
Daniel Miessler
News & Analysis | NO. 350
over a year ago
Society's Backend
MASSIVE New Model Releases from Google, OpenAI, and Meta Change the AI Landscape
Society's Backend Reading List 12-16-2024
6 days ago
Society's Backend Reading List 12-16-2024
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?
8 months ago
On goal drift and lower reliability. Or, why can't LLMs play Conway's Game Of Life?
One Useful Thing
Confronting Impossible Futures
We shouldn't be certain about what is next, but we should plan for it
5 months ago
We shouldn't be certain about what is next, but we should plan for it
Strange Loop Canon
State of the Canon
Onwards
11 months ago
The Berkeley...
Linguistic Bias in ChatGPT: Language Models Reinforce Dialect Discrimination
Sample language model responses to different varieties of English and native speaker...
3 months ago
Sample language model responses to different varieties of English and native speaker reactions.
ChatGPT does amazingly well at communicating with people in English. But whose English?
Only 15% of ChatGPT users are from the US, where Standard American English is the default. But...
Daniel Miessler
Would You Put AI Art In Your House?
I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks about making and hanging some AI art in my house. But I...
over a year ago
I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks about making and hanging some AI art in my house. But I immediately faced some internal resistance. Like, I wasn’t (and still am not) sure whether this is the right way to “do” art. And that got me thinking what that really means. What...
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.
Artificial Ignorance
Who's winning the AI arms race?
It depends whether AI is a "disruptive" or "sustaining" technology.
a year ago
It depends whether AI is a "disruptive" or "sustaining" technology.
AI Snake Oil
Is the future of AI open or closed? Watch today’s Princeton-Stanford workshop
By Sayash Kapoor, Rishi Bommasani, Percy Liang, Arvind Narayanan Perhaps the biggest tech policy...
a year ago
By Sayash Kapoor, Rishi Bommasani, Percy Liang, Arvind Narayanan Perhaps the biggest tech policy debate today is about the future of AI, especially foundation models and generative AI. Will AI be open or closed? Will we be able to download and modify these models, or will a few...
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
Strange Loop Canon
Symposium: On Building God
a year ago
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.
fast.ai
Can LLMs learn from a single example?
We’ve noticed an unusual training pattern in fine-tuning LLMs. At first we thought it’s a bug, but...
a year ago
We’ve noticed an unusual training pattern in fine-tuning LLMs. At first we thought it’s a bug, but now we think it shows LLMs can learn effectively from a single example.
Marcus on AI
Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus says AI must be regulated. He has a plan.
Fantastic writeup of my views today at The Wall Street Journal:
3 weeks ago
Fantastic writeup of my views today at The Wall Street Journal:
Weighty Thoughts
Why we need AI as a society
We’re aging too fast (AKA my entire AI/robotics investment thesis)
7 months ago
We’re aging too fast (AKA my entire AI/robotics investment thesis)
Strange Loop Canon
Strange Loop Canon Commencement Address
5 months ago
IEEE Spectrum
Video Friday: Mars Chopper
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE...
a week 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,...
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.
Society's Backend
Devin Has Exposed a Major Issue with Software Engineering
And isn't that we're all going to lose our jobs
9 months ago
And isn't that we're all going to lose our jobs
fast.ai
A New Chapter for fast.ai: How To Solve It With Code
fast.ai is joining Answer.AI, and we’re announcing a new kind of educational experience, ‘How To...
a month ago
fast.ai is joining Answer.AI, and we’re announcing a new kind of educational experience, ‘How To Solve It With Code’
AI Snake Oil
Generative AI companies must publish transparency reports
The debate about the harms of AI is happening in a data vacuum
a year ago
The debate about the harms of AI is happening in a data vacuum
Artificial Ignorance
I fell for a deepfake Elon Musk’s cryptocurrency scam bait
A lesson in deepfakes, Ponzi schemes, and YouTube algorithm manipulation.
6 months ago
A lesson in deepfakes, Ponzi schemes, and YouTube algorithm manipulation.
Marcus on AI
Sora still appears to have trouble with physics
Exactly as I warned in February
a week ago
Exactly as I warned in February
Sam Altman
Productivity
I think I am
at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me...
over a year ago
I think I am
at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for
productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place.
Compound
growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well,
and it is magic. A...
Strange Loop Canon
Seeing Like A Network
Dark Forests, Dense Networks
6 months ago
Dark Forests, Dense Networks
Artificial Ignorance
AI Roundup 036: The money pit
October 13, 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
The Attention Thief: Machine Learning as a Monetization Weapon
How your greatest asset is silently stolen by technology every day
a year ago
How your greatest asset is silently stolen by technology every day
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...
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