The author co-hosts three events including Rewiring the World and Pax Electricana, and discusses Electric Saul, an AI tool built with Google to advise on household electrification. The author expresses optimism about AI's practical applications in physics, engineering, and design, arguing that machine learning democratizes coding rather than posing existential risks, and notes that Electric Saul conversations cost approximately 30 cents to host with significant climate and economic benefits.
A web-based 20 questions game where players guess a random English noun by asking yes/no questions. The game uses a machine learning model called jev that evaluates questions and determines if the player has guessed correctly, without relying on LLMs or requiring significant computational resources.
Rich Sutton argues that 70 years of AI research demonstrates that general methods leveraging massive computation ultimately outperform approaches that rely on human domain knowledge. He illustrates this through examples in chess, Go, and speech recognition, where computation-intensive techniques defeated human-knowledge-based methods despite initial skepticism from researchers.
Researchers demonstrate that reasoning models in AI exhibit transient chaos and fractal basin structures that increase with task difficulty, causing longer reasoning times on harder problems. This phenomenon occurs when reasoning becomes trapped near saddle points corresponding to nearly-correct solutions, explaining why frontier models spend more computational effort on complex tasks like theorem solving and puzzle solving.
Two PhD candidates at the University of Pennsylvania explored handwritten text recognition (HTR) technology to transcribe premodern Italian and Devanāgarī manuscripts from Penn's collections during a 2025-2026 fellowship. Using the open-source platform eScriptorium and the Kraken ATR system, they created ground truth data through manual transcription to train models, investigating how HTR might streamline manuscript work and enable new research approaches across different scripts.