The AI Reader.
Friday, September 4, 202646 min read
Working Knowledge · The Evidence

A network's error peaks where it can just fit its training data, then falls again

Feed a network 4.5 times the training data and it can get worse, a limit one of the two 2019 papers behind double descent measured directly.

10 min read6 sources
Working Knowledge · The Instruments

A different attack turns 1% into 88% on the same safety test

A single Cisco score branded DeepSeek R1 unsafe, and it came from 50 requests pushed by one attack.

9 min read9 sources
Working Knowledge · The Mechanics

Rename the people in a word problem and the model does worse

A model loses a little accuracy when a problem's names change and a lot when it gains one true but useless sentence, and whether that proves it cannot reason is the part still in dispute.

9 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · What Could Go Wrong

Tesla's lawyers said Elon Musk's recorded words might be a deepfake

The denial that a real recording is a deepfake is already being tried in court and campaigns, and the only experiment to test it found it works on text scandals but largely fails on video, the very evidence it was meant to discredit.

9 min read9 sources
Working Knowledge · When AI Breaks

Houston pushed out teachers over a score they could not check

The district rated its teachers with SAS's private EVAAS formula and ended some contracts on the results, until a 2017 federal ruling found that a score no one could recompute could not lawfully cost a teacher their job.

9 min read9 sources