Author
Machine Learning Street Talk
By and about Machine Learning Street Talk
MLST: Mechanistic Interpretability - NEEL NANDA (DeepMind)
A deep dive with Neel Nanda on mechanistic interpretability: reverse-engineering neural networks, grokking, superposition, transformer circuits, world models, and why understanding model internals matters for AI safety.
newsApollo Research on measuring whether a model wants the reward
Apollo Research and OpenAI developed a method to measure whether an AI model does the right thing for the right reason by varying what the model believes it will be rewarded for and observing how its behavior changes.
newsStealing Hidden Reasoning Traces From Proprietary LLM APIs
Ilia Shumailov and Alexander Panfilov describe an attack that replays providers' encrypted reasoning blobs across users and sibling models, getting a smaller model to decrypt and restate a frontier model's hidden chain of thought in plain text.
newsAdam Becker: every exponential ends
Astrophysicist Adam Becker tells MLST that Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns rests on cherry-picked data, LLMs are "pocket calculators for language", and the doomers are sincere but wrong — and feeding the same growth story.
newsMLST: AI is learning at the wrong level of abstraction
Physicist Matthieu Wyart argues deep networks succeed because real data has hidden hierarchies—parts within parts—and that predicting latent representations rather than raw tokens could make learning far more sample-efficient.
blogAI Socratic May 2025
The most important AI news and updates from last month (April 15 - May 15). A beefy month!
newsDeepMind AlphaEvolve: evolutionary coding agent discovers new algorithms
DeepMind's AlphaEvolve, revealed May 14, 2025, uses evolutionary algorithms powered by Gemini-2 to discover new code that beats 56-year-old methods for matrix multiplication, recovers 0.7% of Google's compute fleet, and speeds up Gemini kernels by 23%.
blogAI Socratic March 2025
All the most important AI news and updates from last month (Feb 20 - Mar 15).
blogAI Socratic, Feb 2025 — Part 1
We collect all the most important AI updates from February.