Status update
It’s been a good one-month break, so I figured it’s a good time to post some new updates!
To new subscribers: hello! 👋 this newsletter was active on a weekly basis up until 23 April 2022, when I sent out the 13th issue of the 13th season. Up till this point, I had been structuring the content around themes, with each season covering each theme one concept at a time. From this point on, I will be posting on a much slower tempo, and no longer in seasons—that means more unstructured posts.
A recent spate of AI-related news, the most recent one being Google engineer Blake Lemoine claiming LaMDA is sentient, got me thinking that maybe AI has finally entered mainstream awareness. While we can’t exactly introspect the inner workings of a machine learning model, I don’t think that is an excuse for treating it as a black box. The explanations I’ve found from tech publications don’t explain what is actually going on in machine learning; time for a layman’s guide!
But I’m definitely out of my depth here, since this is not a topic I’ve had the chance to study even at an undergraduate level. Not that it’s going to stop me! I have been unpacking technical explanations beyond my depth for three years now, no reason to stop at machine learning and AI models.
So expect issues about as fast as I can research, which is probably close to a fortnightly pace. Still the same deal: one concept at a time, no more than 5 minutes of reading for each issue, and all written for a layperson 😃
Until next time, JS