All that is under the Sun
There is a lovely moment in Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction where a machine does something so far beyond expectation that the humans watching it stop asking how fast and start asking how. I had that moment in July 2026 when Moonshot AI shipped Kimi K3: a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model, the largest ever released to the …
The Art of Choosing One From Many: Categorical Cross-Entropy and the AI’s Grand Decision Imagine you’re a librarian training a new assistant. This isn’t just any library; it has 50,000 different sections. You hand the assistant a book and ask, “Where does this go?” The assistant, being new, doesn’t just point to one section. Instead, …
Imagine you’re trying to teach a machine the difference between a cat and a dog. You show it a picture of a cat, and it says, with 90% confidence, “That’s a cat.” Great! Now you show it a dog, and it says, with 60% confidence, “That’s a cat.” Not so great. The second guess is …
Imagine you’re teaching an archery student. They loose an arrow, and it thuds into the target, a little off-center. You wouldn’t just say, “You missed.” To be a good teacher, you need to know how much they missed by. Was it a near-perfect shot, just a hair’s breadth from the bullseye? Or did it land …
Welcome back to All that is under the Sun, your friendly guide through the fascinating, and sometimes bewildering, world of Artificial Intelligence. This month, we’re kicking off a brand-new series that gets to the very heart of how AI learns and improves. Think of it as the AI equivalent of a motivational seminar, a Marie …
“If probability is the language of uncertainty, a PMF is its grammar: crisp, discrete, and occasionally punch‑line worthy.” Picture this: You open your favorite generative‑AI app, type “Write me a haiku about mangoes,” and in less time than it takes to blink, a tiny digital poet complies. What sorcery decides which 17 syllables appear? Beneath …