The AI Reader.
Thursday, July 30, 202646 min read
Working Knowledge · The Mechanics

Whoever else is in the batch settles a near-tied logit

At temperature zero the sampler is off, and a GPU still sums the model's math in an order that depends on which other requests share the batch.

10 min read9 sources
Working Knowledge · What Could Go Wrong

RAND's red-team study found no measurable AI advantage in bioweapons planning

Forty-five red-teamers spent seven weeks testing whether AI access improved biological attack plans and came back with a null result, even as two labs raised their own safeguards without similarly definitive evidence.

10 min read9 sources
Working Knowledge · The Evidence

DeepSeek trained a model to reason without ever showing it a worked example

DeepSeek's January 2025 paper proved reinforcement learning alone can teach a model to reason at length, and the $5.6 million price tag attached to that result belongs to a different model.

9 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · The Instruments

Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental 03-25) fell from 92% to 87% when the exam turned over

With only 15 problems a year, one of them is worth 6.7 points of any headline AIME score.

9 min read10 sources
Working Knowledge · When AI Breaks

A ranked list of candidates was enough to arrest the wrong man

Robert Williams spent 30 hours in a Detroit jail cell over a shoplifting charge built on a facial-recognition match and a photo lineup shown to a witness who wasn't at the scene.

8 min read13 sources