Curated playlist
Machine learning
- Machine Learning (journal)Machine Learning, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, had been running for fifteen years when its own editors turned on its publisher. In 2001, forty of them resigned at once, taking their editorial credibility with them. They were not…
- Mechanistic interpretabilityChris Olah coined the term mechanistic interpretability to describe reverse-engineering neural networks. Before this moment, researchers mostly looked at what models produced rather than how they worked inside. The field emerged as a…
- Developmental roboticsDevelopmental robotics asks a question that would have seemed absurd not long ago: can a machine learn the way a child does? Not by being programmed with every rule, but by exploring, making mistakes, and gradually building up knowledge…
- Fine-tuning (deep learning)Fine-tuning is the process that turned OpenAI's GPT models into ChatGPT. Sparrow, another language model, was shaped through the same technique. In both cases, a neural network already trained on broad general data was adapted to perform a…
- Contrastive Language-Image Pre-trainingContrastive Language-Image Pre-training, known as CLIP, can classify a photograph into any category on earth. It does this without having been trained on that specific category at all. The method, developed originally by OpenAI, taught two…
- Claude (language model)In July 2025, Anthropic retired Claude 3 Sonnet, and around 200 people gathered in San Francisco to hold the software a funeral. The grief was genuine. Wired journalist Kylie Robison described Claude's following as bordering on the…
- Machine learningMachine learning is the field that gave us a computer program capable of beating the world's top players at Go, a game long considered too intuitive for machines to master. That milestone arrived in 2016, when AlphaGo used reinforcement…
- Hugging FaceHugging Face gets its name from a small emoji. Three French entrepreneurs started it as a consumer app. Within a decade, they were acquiring humanoid robotics startups and working with UNESCO on a free translator covering 200 languages.…
- Generative artificial intelligenceIn 1906, Russian mathematician Andrey Markov introduced a concept that would eventually birth generative artificial intelligence. He analyzed vowel and consonant patterns in the novel Eugeny Onegin to model natural language. This early…
- Transfer learningTransfer learning is a technique in machine learning where knowledge built up on one task gets applied to a different but related task. Think of it this way: a system trained to recognize cars in images already understands something about…
- Apprenticeship learningApprenticeship learning asks a deceptively simple question: what if a machine could learn not from rules, but from watching? In artificial intelligence, the field known as apprenticeship learning, or learning from demonstration, treats…
- Fairness (machine learning)Fairness in machine learning is a field driven by specific, documented harms. In 2016, ProPublica published an analysis of COMPAS software, used by US courts to predict whether defendants would reoffend. The finding was pointed: black…
- Pattern recognitionPattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. Every time a bank flags an unusual transaction, or a doctor's software highlights a suspicious shape on a scan, something like…
- Attention (machine learning)Attention, in machine learning, is a method that determines how much weight each part of a sequence deserves relative to every other part. It expresses that importance through numbers called soft weights. When a trained network translates…
- Hallucination (artificial intelligence)AI hallucination is the tendency of artificial intelligence systems to generate false or misleading information presented as fact. Professor Ethan Mollick of Wharton put it memorably. He called ChatGPT an "omniscient, eager-to-please…