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Large language models

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Why Do Researchers Care About Small Language Models?

March 10, 2025

Larger models can pull off greater feats, but the accessibility and efficiency of smaller models make them attractive tools.

The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA

February 5, 2025

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

January 31, 2025

Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to their abilities.

Can AI Models Show Us How People Learn? Impossible Languages Point a Way.

January 13, 2025

Certain grammatical rules never appear in any known language. By constructing artificial languages that have these rules, linguists can use neural networks to explore how people learn.

Debate May Help AI Models Converge on Truth

November 8, 2024

How do we know if a large language model is lying? Letting AI systems argue with each other may help expose the truth.

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.

Will AI Ever Have Common Sense?

July 18, 2024

Common sense has been viewed as one of the hardest challenges in AI. That said, ChatGPT4 has acquired what some believe is an impressive sense of humanity. How is this possible? Listen to this week’s “The Joy of Why” with co-host Steven Strogatz.

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.

How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute

March 21, 2024

Large language models do better at solving problems when they show their work. Researchers are beginning to understand why.

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