The AI Reader.
Saturday, August 8, 202640 min read
Working Knowledge · What Could Go Wrong

Poisoning's two strongest results were never run in the same experiment

Sleeper Agents held a hidden trigger through the full safety stack, and a separate study planted one with just 250 documents, yet neither experiment did what the other did.

9 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · The Instruments

A perfect needle-in-a-haystack score means the model found one planted sentence

Gemini 1.5 clears the test through a million tokens, a benchmark that rewards copying an out-of-place fact and leaves long-context reasoning untested.

8 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · The Mechanics

A model ends its reply by choosing a stop token like any other word

The model learns that stop token in post-training, and a separate length cap can cut a reply off mid-word before it ever arrives.

8 min read9 sources
Working Knowledge · When AI Breaks

A health algorithm predicted cost, and scored sicker Black patients as lower-risk

A 2019 study of nearly 50,000 patients showed the tool doing exactly what it was built to do, predicting next year's medical spending rather than illness.

8 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · The Evidence

king - man + woman = queen scored 65.6% on word2vec's own test

Tomas Mikolov and colleagues at Google reported the figure on a 19,544-question benchmark in 2013, and later analyses found the vector offset leans on excluding the very words the analogy starts from.

7 min read6 sources