The AI Reader.
Tuesday, September 22, 202645 min read
Working Knowledge · The Evidence

LSTM learned to carry a value across 1,000 time steps, on a network of a few thousand weights

The speech recognition and translation the name now carries came years later, on a three-gate cell Hochreiter and Schmidhuber's paper never described.

10 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · What Could Go Wrong

Every automated car that has killed came with a human assigned to watch it

The responsibility-gap argument was built for a machine no one supervises, and no case has yet put that machine on trial.

10 min read11 sources
Working Knowledge · When AI Breaks

Korea fined Iruda's maker for its training data, not its slurs

Scatter Lab trained the chatbot on 9.4 billion private KakaoTalk messages from 600,000 people who had never agreed to that use, and Korea's data regulator made it the country's first AI company fined over how it handled data.

9 min read9 sources
Working Knowledge · The Instruments

HELM's team stopped ranking models by mean win rate

Stanford's HELM team ranked its leaderboard by a count of head-to-head wins, then dropped the number after the same results kept reordering under other defensible choices.

8 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · The Mechanics

Chatbots pad simple answers because the reward model scored longer as better

Humans prefer the longer of two answers 62% of the time, and reinforcement learning amplifies that modest edge into the padded default you get on a question with a one-word answer.

8 min read8 sources