John Pavlus

Contributing Writer

Latest Articles

Science, Promise and Peril in the Age of AI

An exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist.

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History

April 30, 2025

Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.

What the Most Essential Terms in AI Really Mean

April 30, 2025

A simple primer to the 19 most important concepts in artificial intelligence.

Q&A

The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI

February 28, 2025

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.

How Public Key Cryptography Really Works, Using Only Simple Math

November 15, 2024

The security system that underlies the internet makes use of a curious fact: You can broadcast part of your encryption to make your information much more secure.

Q&A

The Computer Scientist Who Builds Big Pictures From Small Details

October 7, 2024

To better understand machine learning algorithms, Lenka Zdeborová treats them like physical materials.

How ‘Embeddings’ Encode What Words Mean — Sort Of

September 18, 2024

Machines work with words by embedding their relationships with other words in a string of numbers.

What Is Machine Learning?

July 8, 2024

Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement at a time.

Q&A

Does AI Know What an Apple Is? She Aims to Find Out.

April 25, 2024

The computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “meaning” into concrete, testable ideas.

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