researchers started by seeking a 1:1 mapping between neurons and concepts, like a neuron that always fired when the AI was thinking about cats, but quickly learned that nothing like that existed.
Large language models are “grown, not built”. Researchers run training data through a neural network. Eventually this creates a working AI; nobody really knows how.
Like this is actually like a new form of test time compute. Like when we talk about the scaling laws and kind of we talk about the model getting more intelligent over time, historically, it's been a function of the size of the neural net, the amount of training data, and the number of flops that you put in to the training. And then recently, we also added test time compute. So this is essentially a fancy way a researcher way of saying how many tokens does it generate. And now dynamic workflows are essentially a new way to orchestrate test time compute.
I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes.
As mentioned before, Uber and Lyft are better regulators than the State’s paper-based taxi medallions, email is superior to the USPS, and SpaceX is out-executing NASA.
And what I had to learn was the reason that people come to me with those out of proportion responses is because that's what they need. They need a hero or they need a villain. and their need for a hero or a villain has nothing to do with me. If it wasn't me, they'd be contacting you. They'd be contacting somebody else. It really doesn't have anything to to do about me.
Comparing this to The Fifth Season, it is striking how different two fantasy novels about worlds over-supplied with natural disasters, and the people with the psychic gifts to stop those disasters with their minds, can be in tone and execution. This is immensely fluffier, but it has no pretensions to be anything except candy, and succeeds as such.
so for example, micro GPT, like I asked I tried to get an agent to write micro GPT. So, I told it like try to boil down the simplest things. Like try to boil down my um neural network training to the simplest thing and it can't do it.
So I would, if I was to redo it today, or for any aspiring hero shooter makers out there, I would actually downplay the team factor, and try to put more focus on individual contribution.
Sixteen is also roughly the age by which a majority of adolescents have completed puberty: a sensitive period of neural reorganization during which it is extremely important to protect the brain.
And the solution is if people become part AI with some kind of neural link++ because what will happen as a result is that now the AI understands something and we understand it too like because now the understanding is transmitted wholesale.
And actually, you don't actually need or want the knowledge. I actually think that's probably actually holding back the neural networks overall because it's actually like getting them to rely on the knowledge a little too much sometimes.
This is a short (~150 pp), brisk first book on the topic for physicists. Most of the book --- the first ten chapters --- are good introduction to common models of spin glasses.
I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).
This means that working on neural networks is NOT getting us closer to AGI, except indirectly.
Their words now
It’s become very difficult for me to maintain the belief in the stupidity of ChatGPT when every time I laugh at it, it ends up ridiculing me 6 months later.
And I think the reason that's possible is that in nature, natural systems have structure because they were subject to evolutionary processes that shape them. And if that's true, then you can maybe learn what that structure is.
Ben's personal reflections on reinventing himself at "midlife" (though relatable at any age). I love how he leaned into a new version of himself without dramatically blowing up his life.
Websites outside of these handful of social networks are harder and harder to even find, and partially because of that, they have a harder and harder time sustaining themselves.
Evil Does Not Exist (Japan) 3.7 This is turning out to be an outstanding year for Japanese films. As is so often the case with films from Asia, it begs to be seen on the big screen. Hard to summarize—imagine if Apichatpong Weerasethakul had directed Local Hero. Warning—his films always start slow, and build to a strong second half.
I also read a ton of technical books last year, but the most impactful one for me was Neural Network Methods for Natural Language processing by Yoav Goldberg
In my practice, I have seen that opening neural pathways can lead to profound change, to brand-new traits and behavior, sometimes in a matter of minutes.
Neurobiologists tell us that it takes two things to unlock and open up a neural pathway. The first is that the implicit must be made explicit. Sometimes you need help seeing what you don't see. But you must be open to the feedback. Second, there must be some sort of recoil, a sense of discrepancy, of "Oh no, I'm not sure I really want to keep doing that."
At the same time, in order to reduce the probability of someone intentionally or unintentionally bringing about a rogue AI, we need to increase governance and we should consider limiting access to the large-scale generalist AI systems that could be weaponized, which would mean that the code and neural net parameters would not be shared in open-source and some of the important engineering tricks to make them work would not be shared either.
The biggest issue is probably that we don’t control neutral networks enough to be able to ensure AI doesn’t harm humans. We can’t even control AI to not reveal internal prompts.
I found myself unexpectedly (and perhaps dangerously) inspired by Miller's discussion of the 15-acre plot of land he and his wife bought outside Nashville, where they're carefully cultivating the forest, planting extensive gardens, and organizing retreats.
If you care about privacy, or want to understand what the NSA and CIA really do to monitor Americans, this book is an important read. It explains from beginning to end how Snowden became the privacy hero he is today, why he decided to leak the information, and how he did it. It's an interesting and important read, but also probably 100 pages too long.
Naysayers will have a lot to object about Rand. But Roark embodied integrity. Integrity is more complicated than Rand presents. I don’t think the hardest questions are in here. But Roark is a good guide for many decisions life will throw at you even if he is an incomplete (or possibly just unfinished) hero.
Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of inference without compromising accuracy.
Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of inference without compromising accuracy.
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About the English under a post
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are left in their original language.