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Machine learning

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How Can AI ID a Cat? An Illustrated Guide.

April 30, 2025

Neural networks power today’s AI boom. To understand them, all we need is a map, a cat and a few thousand dimensions.

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.

The Strange Physics That Gave Birth to AI

April 30, 2025

Modern thinking machines owe their existence to insights from the physics of complex materials.

Q&A

Improving Deep Learning With a Little Help From Physics

April 23, 2025

Rose Yu has a plan for how to make AI better, faster and smarter — and it’s already yielding results.

To Make Language Models Work Better, Researchers Sidestep Language

April 14, 2025

We insist that large language models repeatedly translate their mathematical processes into words. There may be a better way.

Three Hundred Years Later, a Tool from Isaac Newton Gets an Update

March 24, 2025

A simple, widely used mathematical technique can finally be applied to boundlessly complex problems.

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 ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories

February 21, 2025

By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage proposal — that form scaffolds for memories of our experiences.

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