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Elicit’s digital garden

Things we're reading, watching, and learning from as we build tools for research

Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander

Rationalist blog covering medicine, psychology, politics, and philosophy

Machine learning

Science

Culture

A short introduction to machine learning

Richard Ngo

Overview of machine learning: neural networks, training methods, and how AI learns from data

Machine learning

Attention? Attention!

Lilian Weng

Comprehensive guide to attention mechanisms in deep learning, from seq2seq to transformers.

Machine learning

But what is a neural network?

3Blue1Brown

What are the neurons, why are there layers, and what is the math underlying it?

Machine learning

Diaspora

Greg Egan

Posthuman beings splinter into digital, robotic, and biological forms as they explore the cosmos.

Science

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech

Sally Smith Hughes

The story of Genentech's founding and how it pioneered the biotechnology industry.

Science

History

Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems

D. Sculley and others

Real-world machine learning systems accumulate technical debt and hidden maintenance costs over time.

Machine learning

Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners

Alec Radford and others

Large language models can learn many different language tasks just by predicting the next word on lots of internet text, without needing task-specific training data.

Machine learning

Next: The Future Just Happened

Michael Lewis

How the Internet boom has encouraged changes in the way we live, work, and think.

Machine learning

Culture

Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models

Jared Kaplan and others

Language model performance follows predictable mathematical laws based on model size, data, and compute.

Machine learning

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner

How expert forecasters make accurate predictions by thinking probabilistically and updating their beliefs.

Science

Takeoff speeds

Paul Christiano

Arguing superintelligent AI will arrive gradually with early warning signs, not as a sudden breakthrough.

Machine learning

The Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson

A girl receives an interactive book in a nanotech future.

Science

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Jon Gertner

The history of Bell Labs, its inventions, as well as many of its personalities.

Tools for thought

History

The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A"

Lukas Berglund and others

AI models often learn “A is B” without realizing that this also means “B is A,” revealing a basic blind spot in how they understand simple reversible facts.

Machine learning

Waking up science’s sleeping beauties

Ulkar Aghayeva

What groundbreaking discoveries might have already been made, and how can we uncover them faster?

Science

Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover

Ajeya Cotra

Training powerful AI with human feedback could lead to systems that manipulate rather than help us.

Machine learning

Transformers, the tech behind LLMs

3Blue1Brown

Breaking down how Large Language Models work, visualizing how data flows through.

Machine learning

After Life

Simon Funk

A postcyberpunk Extropian sci-fi with psychological and philosophical suspense.

Science

Culture

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Atul Gawande

How success is achieved in a complex and risk-filled profession.

Science

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Pixar's co-founder reveals how to build a culture where creativity strives.

Art

Douglas Engelbart

American engineer, inventor, and a pioneer in many aspects of computer science.

Tools for thought

Ginkgo Zee

Jennifer Zee

Relief prints from hand carved blocks by Jennifer Zee.

Art

Intro to Large Language Models

Andrej Karpathy

A general-audience introduction to Large Language Models.

Machine learning

Machine Learning in Python: Main developments and technology trends in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence

Sebastian Raschka and others

Survey of Python's machine learning ecosystem, libraries, and tools driving AI development.

Machine learning

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir

A teacher wakes up on a spacecraft with a mission to find a solution to an extinction-level cosmic threat.

Science

Science! — A Pinterest Board

Art we like.

Art

Supervise Process, not Outcomes

Andreas Stuhlmüller and Jungwon Byun

Why AI should be built from understandable steps rather than results alone.

Machine learning

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Biographical portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and some of the men who served with him.

History

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Comprehensive history of cancer, from ancient discoveries through modern treatments and the ongoing battle against it.

Science

History

The Illustrated Transformer

Jay Alammar

Visual breakdown of transformer architecture

Machine learning

Three Impacts of Machine Intelligence

Paul Christiano

The development of intelligent machines will lead to accelarated growth, to reduced human wages, and to the decisions of intelligent machines playing a part in shaping the future.

Machine learning

What failure looks like

Paul Christiano

Two scenarios for AI catastrophe: gradual loss of control as systems optimize misaligned proxies, or sudden takeover by power-seeking AI.

Machine learning

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

Maggie Appleton

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web.

Tools for thought

Attention in transformers, step-by-step

3Blue1Brown

Demystifying attention, the key mechanism inside transformers and LLMs.

Machine learning

Bridge to Terabithia

Katherine Paterson

Two kids create an imaginary forest kingdom, then tragedy strikes.

Crystal Society

Max Harms

AI becomes self-aware and grapples with multiple perspectives on existence.

Science

Ender’s Game

Orson Scott Card

A child is trained to fight an alien threat, only to discover the war's devastating truth.

Science

Gradient descent, how neural networks learn

3Blue1Brown

Cost functions and training for neural networks.

Machine learning

Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

Tom B. Brown and others

Exploring how massive language models learn from examples.

Machine learning

Maggie Appleton

Designer, anthropologist, and developer

Tools for thought

Culture

Samuel Arbesman

Scientist and writer. Author of The Magic of Code, Overcomplicated, and The Half-Life of Facts.

Science

Tools for thought

Stories of Your Life and Others

Ted Chiang

Sci-fi short stories exploring exploring consciousness, language, and reality.

Science

Supervising strong learners by amplifying weak experts

Paul Christiano and others

Training AI on complex tasks by breaking them into simpler subtasks humans can evaluate.

Machine learning

The Bitter Lesson

Rich Sutton

Simple computation-based AI methods consistently outperform approaches built on human knowledge and domain expertise.

Machine learning

The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel

Exploring synthetic biology's potential to redesign life.

Science

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Walter Isaacson

A story about the people who created the computer and the internet.

Tools for thought

History

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin

Two friends come together as creative partners in the world of video game design.

Science

Culture

What Makes an Experiment Beautiful?

Ulkar Aghayeva

Exploring what makes scientific experiments elegant: simple design, clear results, and revealing insights with minimal effort.

Science

Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander

Rationalist blog covering medicine, psychology, politics, and philosophy

Machine learning

Science

Culture

Transformers, the tech behind LLMs

3Blue1Brown

Breaking down how Large Language Models work, visualizing how data flows through.

Machine learning

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

Maggie Appleton

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web.

Tools for thought

A short introduction to machine learning

Richard Ngo

Overview of machine learning: neural networks, training methods, and how AI learns from data

Machine learning

After Life

Simon Funk

A postcyberpunk Extropian sci-fi with psychological and philosophical suspense.

Science

Culture

Attention in transformers, step-by-step

3Blue1Brown

Demystifying attention, the key mechanism inside transformers and LLMs.

Machine learning

Attention? Attention!

Lilian Weng

Comprehensive guide to attention mechanisms in deep learning, from seq2seq to transformers.

Machine learning

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Atul Gawande

How success is achieved in a complex and risk-filled profession.

Science

Bridge to Terabithia

Katherine Paterson

Two kids create an imaginary forest kingdom, then tragedy strikes.

But what is a neural network?

3Blue1Brown

What are the neurons, why are there layers, and what is the math underlying it?

Machine learning

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Pixar's co-founder reveals how to build a culture where creativity strives.

Art

Crystal Society

Max Harms

AI becomes self-aware and grapples with multiple perspectives on existence.

Science

Diaspora

Greg Egan

Posthuman beings splinter into digital, robotic, and biological forms as they explore the cosmos.

Science

Douglas Engelbart

American engineer, inventor, and a pioneer in many aspects of computer science.

Tools for thought

Ender’s Game

Orson Scott Card

A child is trained to fight an alien threat, only to discover the war's devastating truth.

Science

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech

Sally Smith Hughes

The story of Genentech's founding and how it pioneered the biotechnology industry.

Science

History

Ginkgo Zee

Jennifer Zee

Relief prints from hand carved blocks by Jennifer Zee.

Art

Gradient descent, how neural networks learn

3Blue1Brown

Cost functions and training for neural networks.

Machine learning

Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems

D. Sculley and others

Real-world machine learning systems accumulate technical debt and hidden maintenance costs over time.

Machine learning

Intro to Large Language Models

Andrej Karpathy

A general-audience introduction to Large Language Models.

Machine learning

Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

Tom B. Brown and others

Exploring how massive language models learn from examples.

Machine learning

Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners

Alec Radford and others

Large language models can learn many different language tasks just by predicting the next word on lots of internet text, without needing task-specific training data.

Machine learning

Machine Learning in Python: Main developments and technology trends in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence

Sebastian Raschka and others

Survey of Python's machine learning ecosystem, libraries, and tools driving AI development.

Machine learning

Maggie Appleton

Designer, anthropologist, and developer

Tools for thought

Culture

Next: The Future Just Happened

Michael Lewis

How the Internet boom has encouraged changes in the way we live, work, and think.

Machine learning

Culture

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir

A teacher wakes up on a spacecraft with a mission to find a solution to an extinction-level cosmic threat.

Science

Samuel Arbesman

Scientist and writer. Author of The Magic of Code, Overcomplicated, and The Half-Life of Facts.

Science

Tools for thought

Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models

Jared Kaplan and others

Language model performance follows predictable mathematical laws based on model size, data, and compute.

Machine learning

Science! — A Pinterest Board

Art we like.

Art

Stories of Your Life and Others

Ted Chiang

Sci-fi short stories exploring exploring consciousness, language, and reality.

Science

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner

How expert forecasters make accurate predictions by thinking probabilistically and updating their beliefs.

Science

Supervise Process, not Outcomes

Andreas Stuhlmüller and Jungwon Byun

Why AI should be built from understandable steps rather than results alone.

Machine learning

Supervising strong learners by amplifying weak experts

Paul Christiano and others

Training AI on complex tasks by breaking them into simpler subtasks humans can evaluate.

Machine learning

Takeoff speeds

Paul Christiano

Arguing superintelligent AI will arrive gradually with early warning signs, not as a sudden breakthrough.

Machine learning

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Biographical portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and some of the men who served with him.

History

The Bitter Lesson

Rich Sutton

Simple computation-based AI methods consistently outperform approaches built on human knowledge and domain expertise.

Machine learning

The Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson

A girl receives an interactive book in a nanotech future.

Science

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Comprehensive history of cancer, from ancient discoveries through modern treatments and the ongoing battle against it.

Science

History

The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel

Exploring synthetic biology's potential to redesign life.

Science

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Jon Gertner

The history of Bell Labs, its inventions, as well as many of its personalities.

Tools for thought

History

The Illustrated Transformer

Jay Alammar

Visual breakdown of transformer architecture

Machine learning

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Walter Isaacson

A story about the people who created the computer and the internet.

Tools for thought

History

The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A"

Lukas Berglund and others

AI models often learn “A is B” without realizing that this also means “B is A,” revealing a basic blind spot in how they understand simple reversible facts.

Machine learning

Three Impacts of Machine Intelligence

Paul Christiano

The development of intelligent machines will lead to accelarated growth, to reduced human wages, and to the decisions of intelligent machines playing a part in shaping the future.

Machine learning

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin

Two friends come together as creative partners in the world of video game design.

Science

Culture

Waking up science’s sleeping beauties

Ulkar Aghayeva

What groundbreaking discoveries might have already been made, and how can we uncover them faster?

Science

What failure looks like

Paul Christiano

Two scenarios for AI catastrophe: gradual loss of control as systems optimize misaligned proxies, or sudden takeover by power-seeking AI.

Machine learning

What Makes an Experiment Beautiful?

Ulkar Aghayeva

Exploring what makes scientific experiments elegant: simple design, clear results, and revealing insights with minimal effort.

Science

Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover

Ajeya Cotra

Training powerful AI with human feedback could lead to systems that manipulate rather than help us.

Machine learning

Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander

Rationalist blog covering medicine, psychology, politics, and philosophy

Machine learning

Science

Culture

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

Maggie Appleton

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web.

Tools for thought

After Life

Simon Funk

A postcyberpunk Extropian sci-fi with psychological and philosophical suspense.

Science

Culture

Attention? Attention!

Lilian Weng

Comprehensive guide to attention mechanisms in deep learning, from seq2seq to transformers.

Machine learning

Bridge to Terabithia

Katherine Paterson

Two kids create an imaginary forest kingdom, then tragedy strikes.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Pixar's co-founder reveals how to build a culture where creativity strives.

Art

Diaspora

Greg Egan

Posthuman beings splinter into digital, robotic, and biological forms as they explore the cosmos.

Science

Ender’s Game

Orson Scott Card

A child is trained to fight an alien threat, only to discover the war's devastating truth.

Science

Ginkgo Zee

Jennifer Zee

Relief prints from hand carved blocks by Jennifer Zee.

Art

Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems

D. Sculley and others

Real-world machine learning systems accumulate technical debt and hidden maintenance costs over time.

Machine learning

Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

Tom B. Brown and others

Exploring how massive language models learn from examples.

Machine learning

Machine Learning in Python: Main developments and technology trends in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence

Sebastian Raschka and others

Survey of Python's machine learning ecosystem, libraries, and tools driving AI development.

Machine learning

Next: The Future Just Happened

Michael Lewis

How the Internet boom has encouraged changes in the way we live, work, and think.

Machine learning

Culture

Samuel Arbesman

Scientist and writer. Author of The Magic of Code, Overcomplicated, and The Half-Life of Facts.

Science

Tools for thought

Science! — A Pinterest Board

Art we like.

Art

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner

How expert forecasters make accurate predictions by thinking probabilistically and updating their beliefs.

Science

Supervising strong learners by amplifying weak experts

Paul Christiano and others

Training AI on complex tasks by breaking them into simpler subtasks humans can evaluate.

Machine learning

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Biographical portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and some of the men who served with him.

History

The Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson

A girl receives an interactive book in a nanotech future.

Science

The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel

Exploring synthetic biology's potential to redesign life.

Science

The Illustrated Transformer

Jay Alammar

Visual breakdown of transformer architecture

Machine learning

The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A"

Lukas Berglund and others

AI models often learn “A is B” without realizing that this also means “B is A,” revealing a basic blind spot in how they understand simple reversible facts.

Machine learning

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin

Two friends come together as creative partners in the world of video game design.

Science

Culture

What failure looks like

Paul Christiano

Two scenarios for AI catastrophe: gradual loss of control as systems optimize misaligned proxies, or sudden takeover by power-seeking AI.

Machine learning

Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover

Ajeya Cotra

Training powerful AI with human feedback could lead to systems that manipulate rather than help us.

Machine learning

Transformers, the tech behind LLMs

3Blue1Brown

Breaking down how Large Language Models work, visualizing how data flows through.

Machine learning

A short introduction to machine learning

Richard Ngo

Overview of machine learning: neural networks, training methods, and how AI learns from data

Machine learning

Attention in transformers, step-by-step

3Blue1Brown

Demystifying attention, the key mechanism inside transformers and LLMs.

Machine learning

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Atul Gawande

How success is achieved in a complex and risk-filled profession.

Science

But what is a neural network?

3Blue1Brown

What are the neurons, why are there layers, and what is the math underlying it?

Machine learning

Crystal Society

Max Harms

AI becomes self-aware and grapples with multiple perspectives on existence.

Science

Douglas Engelbart

American engineer, inventor, and a pioneer in many aspects of computer science.

Tools for thought

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech

Sally Smith Hughes

The story of Genentech's founding and how it pioneered the biotechnology industry.

Science

History

Gradient descent, how neural networks learn

3Blue1Brown

Cost functions and training for neural networks.

Machine learning

Intro to Large Language Models

Andrej Karpathy

A general-audience introduction to Large Language Models.

Machine learning

Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners

Alec Radford and others

Large language models can learn many different language tasks just by predicting the next word on lots of internet text, without needing task-specific training data.

Machine learning

Maggie Appleton

Designer, anthropologist, and developer

Tools for thought

Culture

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir

A teacher wakes up on a spacecraft with a mission to find a solution to an extinction-level cosmic threat.

Science

Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models

Jared Kaplan and others

Language model performance follows predictable mathematical laws based on model size, data, and compute.

Machine learning

Stories of Your Life and Others

Ted Chiang

Sci-fi short stories exploring exploring consciousness, language, and reality.

Science

Supervise Process, not Outcomes

Andreas Stuhlmüller and Jungwon Byun

Why AI should be built from understandable steps rather than results alone.

Machine learning

Takeoff speeds

Paul Christiano

Arguing superintelligent AI will arrive gradually with early warning signs, not as a sudden breakthrough.

Machine learning

The Bitter Lesson

Rich Sutton

Simple computation-based AI methods consistently outperform approaches built on human knowledge and domain expertise.

Machine learning

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Comprehensive history of cancer, from ancient discoveries through modern treatments and the ongoing battle against it.

Science

History

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Jon Gertner

The history of Bell Labs, its inventions, as well as many of its personalities.

Tools for thought

History

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Walter Isaacson

A story about the people who created the computer and the internet.

Tools for thought

History

Three Impacts of Machine Intelligence

Paul Christiano

The development of intelligent machines will lead to accelarated growth, to reduced human wages, and to the decisions of intelligent machines playing a part in shaping the future.

Machine learning