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New Conversations, Deep Questions, Bold Ideas in Season Four of ‘The Joy of Why’
Steven Strogatz and Janna Levin return for a new season on major scientific and mathematical questions of our time, with 12 all-new episodes and a new format.
Why Do Researchers Care About Small Language Models?
Larger models can pull off greater feats, but the accessibility and efficiency of smaller models make them attractive tools.
‘Next-Level’ Chaos Traces the True Limit of Predictability
In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle.
The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI
By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.
Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive
Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now beginning to understand the implications.
Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture
A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.
The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA
By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.
Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations
Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to their abilities.
New Book-Sorting Algorithm Almost Reaches Perfection
The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal.