This essay first appeared in Reboot. Credulous, breathless coverage of “AI existential risk” (abbreviated “x-risk”) has reached the mainstream. Who could have foreseen that the smallcaps onomatopoeia “ꜰᴏᴏᴍ” — both evocative of and directly derived from children’s cartoons — might show up uncritically in the New Yorker? More than ever, the public discourse about AI […]

Once considered a forbidden topic in the AI community, discussions around the concept of AI consciousness are now taking center stage, marking a significant shift since the current AI resurgence began over a decade ago. For example, last year, Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, made headlines claiming the large language model he was developing

Contents This article is one of two Distill publications about graph neural networks. Take a look at A Gentle Introduction to Graph Neural Networks for a companion view on many things graph and neural network related. Many systems and interactions – social networks, molecules, organizations, citations, physical models, transactions – can be represented quite naturally

This article is one of two Distill publications about graph neural networks. Take a look at Understanding Convolutions on Graphs to understand how convolutions over images generalize naturally to convolutions over graphs. Graphs are all around us; real world objects are often defined in terms of their connections to other things. A set of objects,

Over the past five years, Distill has supported authors in publishing artifacts that push beyond the traditional expectations of scientific papers. From Gabriel Goh’s interactive exposition of momentum, to an ongoing collaboration exploring self-organizing systems, to a community discussion of a highly debated paper, Distill has been a venue for authors to experiment in scientific

Contents This article is part of the Differentiable Self-organizing Systems Thread, an experimental format collecting invited short articles delving into differentiable self-organizing systems, interspersed with critical commentary from several experts in adjacent fields. Self-Organising Textures This article makes strong use of colors in figures and demos. Click here to adjust the color palette. In a

This article is part of the Circuits thread, an experimental format collecting invited short articles and critical commentary delving into the inner workings of neural networks. Branch Specialization Introduction Open up any ImageNet conv net and look at the weights in the last layer. You’ll find a uniform spatial pattern to them, dramatically unlike anything

This article is part of the Circuits thread, an experimental format collecting invited short articles and critical commentary delving into the inner workings of neural networks. Visualizing Weights Weight Banding Introduction If we think of interpretability as a kind of “anatomy of neural networks,” most of the circuits thread has involved studying tiny little veins

Acknowledgments We are deeply grateful to Sandhini Agarwal, Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Tom Brown, Jeff Clune, Steve Dowling, Gretchen Krueger, Brice Menard, Reiichiro Nakano, Aditya Ramesh, Pranav Shyam, Ilya Sutskever and Martin Wattenberg. Author Contributions Gabriel Goh: Research lead. Gabriel Goh first discovered multimodal neurons, sketched out the project direction and paper outline, and did

Contents This article is part of the Differentiable Self-organizing Systems Thread, an experimental format collecting invited short articles delving into differentiable self-organizing systems, interspersed with critical commentary from several experts in adjacent fields. Self-classifying MNIST Digits Adversarial Reprogramming of Neural Cellular Automata Neural Cellular Automata (NCA We use NCA to refer to both Neural Cellular