Published inTowards Data Science·PinnedMember-onlyWhy We Might Be Looking At The Brain In The Wrong Way…with important implications for AI — The mind tries to understand the world in terms of concepts, most of which are dressed in language and in some cases, in mathematics. But our conceptual understanding of the world suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem: where do the concepts in which this understanding is modeled come from in the…Neuroscience10 min readNeuroscience10 min read
Sep 10Member-onlyThe Biggest Unsung Tragedy of the 20th CenturyHistory is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake. — James Joyce When we think of the 20th century we think of a fair share of profound tragedies. Some might think of famous disasters like the sinking of the Titanic or the Chernobyl disaster. Above most tragedies tower the…Health8 min readHealth8 min read
Aug 31Member-onlyGenius and the Power of Mental VisualizationFor the first time in my life, I played not merely with my hands, but with my mind. — Dr. B., Chess Novella In Stefan Zweig’s Chess Novella, the reigning world chess champion, Czentovic, is on board a ship from New York to Buenos Aires, and is challenged to a…Visualization9 min readVisualization9 min read
Aug 19Member-onlyOppenheimer or the Inevitability of Doom“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” J. Robert Oppenheimer In Hindu cosmology, the world cycles between birth, life, and destruction. At the ending stage of a…Nuclear Weapons13 min readNuclear Weapons13 min read
Published inTowards Data Science·Aug 15Member-onlyWhy More Is More (in Artificial Intelligence)How Large Neural Networks Generalize — Less is more. -Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Less is more only when more is too much. - Frank Loyd Wright Deep neural networks (DNNs) have profoundly transformed the landscape of machine learning, often becoming synonymous with the broader fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Yet, their rise would…Artificial Intelligence10 min readArtificial Intelligence10 min read
Published inTowards Data Science·Jun 27Member-onlyWhy There Kind of Is Free LunchOn The Universality of Patterns in Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence — ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ - Robert A. Henlein The “No Free Lunch” theorem in the realm of machine learning reminds me of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem within the world of mathematics. While these theorems are frequently cited, they are seldom explained in depth, and the implications…Machine Learning11 min readMachine Learning11 min read
Published inTowards Data Science·May 15Member-onlyThe Power of the Dot Product in Artificial IntelligenceHow a simple tool gives rise to astonishing complexity — Taking something simple and scaling it up to achieve something more complex is a powerful idea, laying the foundation of life, computers (based on the simplicity of the Turing machine), and deep learning techniques (based on the idea of the neurons in a neural network). More is frequently different, which…Artificial Intelligence9 min readArtificial Intelligence9 min read
Jan 28Member-onlyWhat AI Safety Can Learn From Totalitarian StatesWe are taking continuous steps towards ever more intelligent and powerful AI systems, and it is clear that even narrow AI systems have increasing influence over our lives. Understanding them and maintaining control over them might be one of the most existentially relevant tasks of the century. This task is…History9 min readHistory9 min read
Dec 8, 2022Member-onlyWorld Cups and the Curse of Low Sample Sizes“14 games is a fairly low sample size. If you want to determine who the best player is, you need more matches. If you want to find the best player, you need to change the format to increase the chance of finding the best player.” Magnus Carlsen, World Chess Champion …World Cup6 min readWorld Cup6 min read
Published inTowards Data Science·Nov 9, 2022Member-onlyMemory and Generalization in Artificial Intelligence“The ability to generalize to unseen data is at the core of machine learning.” At the heart of much of current AI research is the question of how to make algorithms generalize to unseen data. In the context of machine learning, most models are trained and evaluated on data following…Artificial Intelligence9 min readArtificial Intelligence9 min read