This story doesn’t end with a hero riding off across a horizon into the setting sun. Not that type of convention. Keep reading. You’ll see.

I spent a lot of my time in school writing about strange and wonderful connections between authors who lived just far enough apart in time that they could not have possibly known one another. Nonetheless, they seem to have shared specific ideas, if not solely through their work.

I’ve written poems about my grandfather since I took up writing. This one is the closest to the truth I may have come when I wasn’t dreaming.

Researchers are starting to unravel one of the biggest mysteries behind the AI language models that power text and image generation tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT.

For a while now, machine learning experts and scientists have noticed something strange about large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s LaMDA: they are inexplicably good at carrying out tasks that they haven’t been specifically trained to perform. It’s a perplexing question, and just one example of how it can be difficult, if not impossible in most cases, to explain how an AI model arrives at its outputs in fine-grained detail.