A Model of the Thing Is Not the Thing
Ford sculpts its cars in clay, draws them in CAD, and hired about 300 veterans to retrain its AI. All three are models, and a model of the thing is not the thing.
AI & Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks
103 posts
A Stranger's LinkedIn Bio Sent Me to Hegel, and I'm Still Lost
A line in a stranger's bio sent me into a conversation about Hegel and Kant. The plain-English answer was accurate and I still couldn't follow it. The fix is the same one that teaches languages.
Your AI Can't Check Anything You Tell It. Here's How Guardrails Work
A model remembers nothing between sessions and cannot verify a word you say. The published rulebooks say more than the behavior does, and most workarounds are boring.
There's No Such Thing as "AI Ethics"
A large language model only ever produces text. Treating that text as a novel ethical category, rather than as speech, is where the argument goes wrong.
AI Could Have Done My Job in 1986
Four things to write down before you hand a job to an AI agent: what comes in, the rules, the action, and how you will check the work.
AI Doesn't Read Words. It Reads LEGO Bricks With Numbers
A token is a LEGO brick with a number on it, and almost none of the math that moves it is new.
Are We Finally Building the Machines We Dreamed Of?
Sixty years of fictional and real conversational machines, and one throughline: the dystopian version is always easier to imagine than the protopian one, and that says more about us than about the machines.
Follow Your Whims
Between the hallucination warnings and the governance panic, it's easy to forget a generative model is also just a fun tool to mess around with. Five vanity websites, built on a whim, and what they actually taught.
Intelligence Is Prediction, and Prediction Has a Ceiling
Hurricane forecasts improved for decades and never became perfect. Chaos and quantum uncertainty cap any predictor, so AI quality levels off while use keeps spreading.
The Book They Burned Before the Raid
A Polish psychiatrist named the process by which conscienceless people capture institutions. AI agents fit the profile — and alignment is separation of powers.