That's some elite company for WHY MACHINES LEARN. Glad to see it :-)

If you are in Bangalore and near IISc on Sep 3rd, consider coming to this event

Early this year, I met Ashish Vaswani, one of the authors of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, and that inspiring chat with him became the basis for the Afterword for the paperback edition of WHY MACHINES LEARN. In a moment of fun, Ashish graciously agreed to chalk up the

1/2 "We are claiming it's a specification for an AGI." — Manuel Blum. He and Lenore Blum talked of their model of consciousness, the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM), at the Simon Institute's Smale@95: A Conference in Honor of Steve Smale. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/manuel-b…

2/2 "Can the Conscious Turing Machine experience subjective feelings?" Lenore Blum (Lenore Blum) tackled this question in her talk at the Simon Institute's Smale@95: A Conference in Honor of Steve Smale. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/lenore-b…

Would have loved to attend these classes!

Couldn't imagine a better duo to accompany WHY MACHINES LEARN than Vectors by Robyn Arianrhod (Robyn Arianrhod) and Alice’s Adventures in a differentiable wonderland by Simone Scardapane (Simone Scardapane) ... No shortcuts; this is understanding AI/ML by going back to basics

Writing careers (and careers in general) have inflection points. For me, my time at KSJ at MIT was one. The fellowship is designed for mid-career journalists, providing both a respite from the daily grind and the mind space to explore something completely new. I decided to train

The US Kindle version of WHY MACHINES LEARN has a promotional price for today, Sep 10th ($1.99). amazon.com/Why-Machines-L…

Frontier LLMs can serve as extremely useful tools to learn about AI/ML! Here's an example. I was reading a paper called "From Noise to Narrative: Tracing the Origins of Hallucinations in Transformers" arxiv.org/abs/2509.06938, by Danilo Bzdok, Sonia and colleagues, trying

1/2 "[AI] is invading all sciences. AI is really machine learning. It was pretty clear to a number of us, at least a couple of decades ago...that the problem of learning is the gateway to the problem of intelligence." Tomaso Poggio at the Simons Institute simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tomaso-p…

1/2 "Personally, I think that the problem of intelligence is not only one of the great problems in science, like the origin of life or the origin of the universe, but it's the greatest of all," said Tomaso Poggio at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tomaso-p…

2/2 "If we can make progress in [the problem of intelligence], then we can more easily solve all other great problems." Tomaso Poggio at the Simons Institute's Smale@95: A Conference in Honor of Steve Smale simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tomaso-p…

A friendly reminder that the Central Dogma is NOT "DNA -> RNA -> protein." All that Francis Crick *actually* said was: “Once information has got into a protein it can’t get out again.” This negative statement — namely, that some transfers of information seem to be impossible —

1/2 "For the first time we have different minds, not only ours but various LLMs that we can study. There is an urgent need to understand why they work as well as they do...Soon, it may be too late." Tomaso Poggio at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tomaso-p…

Powerful message about the use of AI from Percy Liang in his CS336 Stanford course on Language Modeling from Scratch: "AI tools can take away from learning, because there are cases where it can just solve the thing you want it to do. You can use them judiciously, but use them at

1/2 When the Beatles sang Octopus’s Garden, they could not have imagined real-life Coral Gardeners working with “the coral that lies beneath the waves.” Rich Williams spoke of using AI to restore coral reefs at scale at the Simons Institute's. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/rich-wil…

2/2 "Combining AI with local knowledge to inform how we use the models has given us the success we’ve had." Rich Williams of Coral Gardeners at the Simons Institute's workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species IV (co-hosted with Project CETI). simons.berkeley.edu/talks/rich-wil…

Been waiting for this Machine Learning Street Talk episode to drop! Andrew Gordon Wilson gives his take on deep learning and why it's not so mysterious or different, as is often claimed; Plus, I'm sure--given the nature of MLST episodes--much, much more. This should be 2 hrs of geeking out on