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Artificial Intelligence

How the systems actually work, and what they cannot do

Explainers on machine learning for people who intend to build with it: what the architectures do, what the benchmarks measure, and which claims survive contact with data you did not choose.

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The foundational topics in artificial intelligence.

Nested diagram showing generative models inside deep learning, inside machine learning, inside artificial intelligence, with the question each layer answers

What is Artificial Intelligence?

AI, machine learning, deep learning and generative models are nested, not synonymous. Here is what distinguishes each layer, and which one people now mean when they say AI.

Nanoschool AI Desk · 4 min
Four positions on artificial general intelligence plotted by what each treats as the main obstacle

Is Artificial General Intelligence possible?

Four serious positions on AGI, what each treats as the binding constraint, and — for each — the observation that would refute it. A guide to holding the question rather than picking a side.

Nanoschool AI Desk · 4 min

All artificial intelligence articles

3 pieces published.

An attention matrix for a nine-word sentence showing which earlier words each word draws from, with the pronoun resolving to its referent

What a transformer is actually doing when it "reads"

Attention, explained through a single nine-token sentence: what the weights mean, why the upper triangle of the matrix is empty, and what that mask has to do with the model's failure modes.

Nanoschool AI Desk · 4 min

Artificial Intelligence terms

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agentic aiartificial general intelligenceattentionbenchmarkdeep learningembeddingfine-tuninghallucinationmachine learningoverfittingparameterretrieval-augmented generation
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