Archives
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How AI Works, Part 6: Agents
This is the last post in the series, and it’s the one everything else was building toward. Understanding, learning, language, sight, and the ability to act all combine into AI […]
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How AI Works, Part 5: Automation
Automation is what happens when a machine stops understanding the world and starts acting on it: two histories of automation, where the numbers stand today, and the line between surveillance and control in The Apex Code.
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How AI Works, Part 4: How Machines Learn to See
How machines learn to see, from convolutional networks to AI mammogram screening, and the rogue AI watching the cameras in The Apex Code.
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How AI Works, Part 3: How Do Machines Learn Language?
Two weeks ago I asked what intelligence even is. Last week, I went through the five different ways machines learn: biology, evolution, probability, first principles, analogy. Now it’s time to […]
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How AI Works, Part 2: How Machines Learn
In the first post in this series, we talked about how to define intelligence. This week, we’re going to look at how machines learn: the five main types of learning […]
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How AI Works, Part 1: What Is Intelligence?
In this series of posts, we’re going to explore some of the concepts behind how AI works, so you can see how I approached the background for introducing and discussing […]
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The Autonomous Submarine That Wasn’t Real Yet
When I wrote the autonomous submarine at the heart of The Apex Code‘s opening chapters, it was speculative, grounded in active engineering, but nothing quite like it existed yet. That’s […]
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Computer Hacking 101
Many of the hacking techniques used in The Apex Code — including a healthy dose of social engineering — are taken from the real thing. As basic as some of […]
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When Fiction Borrows From Real Headlines: The Hardware Backdoor Nobody Could Explain
Most of the technologies and events in The Apex Code are loosely based on real capabilities and real headlines — dramatized in places to help the story along, but rarely […]
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AI Escape – In the Headlines (Again!)
I was thinking about a completely different post this week, when OpenAI admitted in the news that its advanced AI model broke out of a secure test environment (sandbox) and […]