Linguist Noam Chomsky had argued that statistical machine learning approaches to language merely approximate data without producing scientific understanding, calling this a novel and flawed notion of success. In response, Peter Norvig wrote an essay examining Chomsky's claims point by point, questioning whether engineering success in language modeling is truly irrelevant to science and whether Chomsky's characterization of statistical models is accurate.
norvig.com
· 2026-11-06
Prominent AI researchers are pointing to data showing that AI models are increasingly being used to speed up the research and development of future AI systems. The trend, framed around a widely circulated chart, suggests AI tools are now contributing meaningfully to improving successor models rather than just being built by human engineers alone.
wsj.com
· 2026-10-31
Jing Wang, who leads Vanguard's Center for AI & Insights, spoke about the firm's efforts in artificial intelligence, machine learning, generative AI and behavioral science. She previously held leadership roles across several Vanguard divisions and worked at Boston Consulting Group before joining Vanguard in 2009.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-10-22
Microsoft researchers published a study in Nature describing a machine learning system that corrects bias in existing physics-based and AI weather models, improving forecast accuracy two to six weeks ahead. The tool, now available as open-source software, can run on standard CPUs rather than requiring supercomputers or powerful GPUs.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-14
Researchers describe a probabilistic forecasting method for predicting weather two to six weeks ahead, built on ERA5 reanalysis data from 1979-2026 and evaluated using ECMWF's AI Weather Quest competition framework. The approach forecasts temperature, precipitation and sea-level pressure as probability distributions across climatological quantile bins, scored using the Ranked Probability Skill Score.
nature.com
· 2026-10-14
A technical explainer breaks down NVIDIA's DLSS upscaling technology, describing how GPUs render games at a lower internal resolution before upscaling to a monitor's native output using machine learning models trained on motion, depth and brightness data. It outlines the three main presets—Quality, Balanced and Performance—each rendering from a progressively lower starting resolution, trading fidelity for higher frame rates.
engadget.com
· 2026-10-13
A new paper describes Minions, a distributed system that aggregates spare GPU capacity from macOS devices running Apple Silicon chips to run large-scale machine learning inference workloads. The authors say the system handles task scheduling, fault tolerance, and resource utilization across these devices without requiring teams to buy additional GPU hardware.
machinelearning.apple.com
· 2026-10-13
Marine biologist David Gruber founded Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, which applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze and interpret sperm whale vocalizations. Gruber's path to the project ran through earlier academic work in microbiology, oceanography, and marine biology before he turned to studying animal communication.
blue-continuum.com
· 2026-10-02
A technical post explains the Softmax function, which converts an N-dimensional vector of real numbers into another N-dimensional vector of values between 0 and 1 that sum to 1. Using worked numeric examples, it shows how Softmax acts as a smoothed version of the maximum function, giving the largest input a disproportionately larger share of the output while still assigning smaller shares to other elements.
eli.thegreenplace.net
· 2026-10-01
An American software engineer and researcher at Google has completed a PhD in Computer Science at the Institute of Science Tokyo (formerly Tokyo Institute of Technology), funded by Japan's MEXT Scholarship. He pursued the degree while continuing full-time work at Google, having previously studied automata theory during an earlier, uncompleted PhD attempt in Korea before joining Google. He now works on on-device language models for keyboards.
tokyodev.com
· 2026-09-30
According to a New York Times report cited by EFF, DraftKings trains a machine learning model on customer betting histories to identify gamblers likely to keep losing money. The company then sends these identified users targeted promotions designed to draw them back onto the platform to place more bets.
eff.org
· 2026-09-29
Christian Kästner, who teaches Machine Learning in Production at Carnegie Mellon, says he has overhauled most assessments in his course because AI agents can now complete take-home assignments convincingly. Instead of grading homework, he now focuses evaluation on TA interactions, exams, and video demonstrations, while keeping the course's core learning goals on engineering tradeoffs and teamwork largely unchanged. Students are permitted to use AI tools freely except during written and oral exams.
thelastsoftwareengineer.substack.com
· 2026-09-24
GoKawiil