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Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon

It’s Agent Week at Understanding AI! This week I’m going to publish a series of articles explaining the most important AI trend of 2025: agents! Today is a deep dive into reinforcement learning, the training technique that made agentic models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and o3 possible. Today’s article is available for free, but some articles in the series—including tomorrow’s article on MCP and tool use—will be for paying subscribers only. I’m offering a 20 percent discount on annual subscriptions

The Personalized Learning Revolution: An EdTech Insider’s Perspective

Back in the 90s, when I was in school, education was like a uniform everyone had to wear—the same textbooks, the same blackboard, and the same hurried lessons for all. If you fell behind, your only lifeline was to awkwardly raise your hand in the middle of class or spend hours in the library after school, rifling through reference books. Fast forward 30 years, and it’s fascinating how far we’ve come. Today, thanks to AI/ML, we have adaptive learning systems—tailored to each student based on thei

Show HN: PILF, The ultimate solution to catastrophic oblivion on AI models

Technical Notes: PILF (Predictive Integrity Learning Framework) Document Version: 3.0 Core Concept: A cognitive learning framework designed to transform fixed hyperparameters (like learning rate, model capacity) into dynamic policies driven in real-time by the intrinsic "surprise" ( Surprise ) of data. It is essentially an adaptive hyperparameter scheduling algorithm that allows a model to autonomously decide "how much to learn" and "with what capacity to learn" based on the value of the learn

Beyond static AI: MIT’s new framework lets models teach themselves

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Researchers at MIT have developed a framework called Self-Adapting Language Models (SEAL) that enables large language models (LLMs) to continuously learn and adapt by updating their own internal parameters. SEAL teaches an LLM to generate its own training data and update instructions, allowing it to permanently absorb new knowledge and lea

Tech giants unleash AI on weather forecasts: are they any good?

A wave of machine-learning weather models have been unleashed by some of the very biggest businesses on the planet. These challenge the orthodoxy of traditional physics-based computer forecasts that have been incrementally developed and improved over many decades. But are the machine learning models any good? The weather is a national obsession for us Brits, and it is no wonder given the huge changes that are seen and felt from one day to the next.

Foundations of Computer Vision (2024)

Foundations of Computer Vision Preface Dedicated to all the pixels. About this Book This book covers foundational topics within computer vision, with an image processing and machine learning perspective. We want to build the reader’s intuition and so we include many visualizations. The audience is undergraduate and graduate students who are entering the field, but we hope experienced practitioners will find the book valuable as well. Our initial goal was to write a large book that provided a g

Tiny-diffusion: A minimal implementation of probabilistic diffusion models

A minimal PyTorch implementation of probabilistic diffusion models for 2D datasets. Get started by running python ddpm.py -h to explore the available options for training. Forward process A visualization of the forward diffusion process being applied to a dataset of one thousand 2D points. Note that the dinosaur is not a single training example, it represents each 2D point in the dataset. Reverse process This illustration shows how the reverse process recovers the distribution of the trainin

Foundations of Computer Vision

Foundations of Computer Vision Preface Dedicated to all the pixels. About this Book This book covers foundational topics within computer vision, with an image processing and machine learning perspective. We want to build the reader’s intuition and so we include many visualizations. The audience is undergraduate and graduate students who are entering the field, but we hope experienced practitioners will find the book valuable as well. Our initial goal was to write a large book that provided a g

Q-learning is not yet scalable

Does RL scale? Over the past few years, we've seen that next-token prediction scales, denoising diffusion scales, contrastive learning scales, and so on, all the way to the point where we can train models with billions of parameters with a scalable objective that can eat up as much data as we can throw at it. Then, what about reinforcement learning (RL)? Does RL also scale like all the other objectives? Apparently, it does. In 2016, RL achieved superhuman-level performance in games like Go and C

ChatGPT Glossary: 52 AI Terms Everyone Should Know

AI is now a part of our everyday lives. From the massive popularity of ChatGPT to Google cramming AI summaries at the top of its search results, AI is completely taking over the internet. With AI, you can get instant answers to pretty much any question. It can feel like talking to someone who has a Ph.D. in everything. But that aspect of AI chatbots is only one part of the AI landscape. Sure, having ChatGPT help do your homework or having Midjourney create fascinating images of mechs based on c

Computing’s Top 30: Tejas Padliya

Balancing technology and social good is tricky; doing it well requires both practical expertise and a compelling vision. For software engineer Tejas Padliya, alchemizing the two is the driving force in his work. Padliya’s expertise is in AI and digital health technologies. His vision? For AI to be both a tool and a catalyst for equitable, data-driven healthcare transformation. In conference presentations and elsewhere, Padliya conveys two powerful messages: Technology is about changing lives,

A Deep Learning Alternative Can Help AI Agents Gameplay the Real World

A new machine learning approach that draws inspiration from the way the human brain seems to model and learn about the world has proven capable of mastering a number of simple video games with impressive efficiency. The new system, called Axiom, offers an alternative to the artificial neural networks that are dominant in modern AI. Axiom, developed by a software company called Verse AI, is equipped with prior knowledge about the way objects physically interact with each other in the game world.