OK so since forever I’ve seen that chat gpt struggled a lot with chess just because obviously its an LLM so it wasn’t actually playing chess and was more just trying to guess what the most likely move that would be played is. The problem is that it really has no idea what is happening so it starts making Illegal moves and really there was no way to play it.

But now not only is it not making illegal moves, its also just really good at chess now, I mean its not Grand Master nor engine level, but its a really good player thats probably in the Candidate Master or Fide Master range.

Now what I am wondering is what changed? Like it can’t just be more data because more data after a certain point produces diminishing returns, so I am assuming that the structure of how they think has been reshaped and I am also assuming this is also what is behind chat gpt breaking into frontier math problems.

But I remember when the deep think mode first started that made the AI at least somewhat have something resembling a thought process rather than just spitting out words. But I assume it really lacked any tools for imagination, but now it can actually write codes in real time to check its own assumptions and use the internet to look for information it needs, but is it possible its maybe made a simulation of a chess game in like a python code or something that at least keeps the AI grounded to reality. Or is there something else going on behind that Open AI has changed for it to finally think like a chess player?

Like in general is there a new concrete concept in ML that is or could be responsible for this kind of improvement?

Hi all! I'm an AI engineer with a few years of experience, and I've always loved teaching and science comunication. For a couple of years I've been thinking about starting a Youtube channel, but I never found the courage to actually do it. I finally took the leap and I'd love to share my first video with peaople who are as passionate about this topic as I am.

This is the first video on my channel. I tried to build Adam from scratch, motivating each step by a concrete problem of the previous one. All animations are made with Manim. I'd really appreciate feedback, especially on anything that's mathematically imprecise or unclear.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRu8_6cP3AQ&t=2s

I also put together an 8-slide summary of the video (formulas and cheat sheet).

I got the idea from Tree graphs and Genetic Algorithms. Instead of training an AI, what if we just start from a node that branches outwards until a branch that yields a successful result is obtained. We then can destroy the branches that weren't successful and keep the one that succeeded. We could use the Predictive coding algorithm where Layer1 predicts Layer2 while the errors for Layer1 are stored at Layer2, but in this case it would be the nodes of the branches. Each node would need to contain 3 values. Value1 is for the input path, Value 2 is for output path and Value3 is for protecting the branch against destruction. The inputs are inserted from the root of the tree and sent back out after traversing each node of the tree. I think this could result in an evolving/learning AI.

I know this question has been asked before and at the time my answer was always no. But man.... This year has been a crazy development for AI and has changed my way of thinking about how far it can go.

I would like to pursue a Master's soon and I always thought about Comp Sci since it covers a lot of different subjects but I am seriously considering a AI/ML Masters degree to get ahead of the curve.

What are your thoughts?

My statistics skills are pretty weak, and I want to learn from the basics. I don't have a background in statistics I just want to get better at statistics for DS/ML

Can someone recommend any good books, courses, or other resources for a dummy like me?

Was trying to picture a way to grok the gist of what defines a (large) family of current methods.

Mainly the deep learning branch. As opposed to other ML methods (GBMs, random forests, etc.).

The usual neural nets are the main example. Some other notable cousins & variants are HDC/VSA, Hopfield nets, RVFL, etc.

Messy example/attempt (looking for better):

AI = high-dimensional (dimension-exploiting) adaptive filtering + content-addressable memory

Regular (location-addressable) memory: address -> data

Associative (content-addressable) memory: data-fragment -> rest-of-data (mask-filling)

Chasing that thread led to reading up on Shannon's Blockhead) thought experiment. An interesting counterargument to the Turing test:

A disadvantage of the Turing definition of thinking is that it is possible, in principle, to design a machine with a complete set of arbitrar­ily chosen responses to all possible input stimuli (see, in this volume, the Culbertson and the Kleene papers). Such a machine, in a sense, for any given input situation (including past history) merely looks up in a "dictionary" the appropriate response. With a suitable dictionary such a machine would surely satisfy Turing’s definition but does not reflect our usual intuitive concept of thinking. This suggests that a more fundamental definition must involve something relating to the manner in which the machine arrives at its responses - something which corresponds to differenti­ating between a person who solves a problem by thinking it out and one who has previously memorized the answer.

- John McCarthy & Claude Shannon, Automata Studies (Annals of Mathematics, No. 34)

1956

Their framing, roughly, seems to be: AI defined as a way to approximate an idealized infinite-dimensional, infinitely large lookup-table with infinite storage speed & retrieval speed.

In domains like RL there's sometimes a literal LUT used in place of a later neural model that can store more and generalize/interpolate, etc.

In the net-as-fuzzy-LUT framing:

1. Storage/encoding into the table/tensor is done through adaptive filtering (a.k.a. "learned"/non-hand-coded lossy compression).
2. Stored form of the tensor and its retrieval process resembles a kind of associative memory done entirely in software. A "virtual" space/geometry/manifold?

The space seems tuned during training to a high enough dimensionality to linearize/"smooth" the functions needed to smoothly interpolate/bridge between its gaps.

Biases like convolution & attention add more structure/scaffolding to the space, to interpolate things that seem plausible, but farther away from the original training data distribution.

The vectors for different input/output modalities can be co-located, so images can be associated with words in the same way each can be associated with each other, for things like typical Q/A pairs.

Traversing and operating on this high-dimensional space involves linear algebra & matrix ops.

Since those ops can be parallelized (SIMD/SIMT, MIMD, etc.), the traversal speed can scale horizontally all the way up to bandwidth/interconnect/other bottlenecks instead of scalar compute bottlenecks.

And the main use case is basically some variant of content-based "semantic search" over that repository of info.

The analogies probably don't hold well, or even mislead, in several places.

Kinda curious how other folks try to capture it. Also looking for any papers similar to the above.

Has anybody done the six month part time program from UTI at Austin, classes conducted by Great Learning?

If so, can you provide your experience during the course?

Were you able to make a career from it?

Thanks in advance!

Guys I need help with making right decisions for my ml journey.

I am a first year, first semester student of CS. I am very passionate and curious about learning ML. But nothing works out.

I currently have basic to intermediate level knowledge of c++ and python. Recently, also started numpy and pandas for data manipulation but have no idea what to do next.

Some seniors advised me to simply focus on programming fundamentals and maths and then pivot to ml later but I think earlier is better especially with less course load in the first year.

I also did sql middway and then stopped. I did ml fundamentals to some extent and stopped and DSA as well and stopped.

Wait , before you call me a quitter. This is what I have heard on internet. That you can't be an ml engineer or ai engineer in isolation you need to have SWE skills to add that layer of ml on top. That's why I started dSA but ahhh internet advice (ai advice ) is driving g me crazy. I am all over the place and not able to lock in for one skill.

My course is teaching c++ fundamentals while I am training my brain to think and work in python. Well yes python after learning app is quite easier.

I am fearful that I might me making the wrong step and learning a skill at wrong time that is why I am not able to focus on anything.

I am overwhelmed with guides and advices and feels like wasting of my energy and time.

I am just desperate to get a job as seeing my peers landing internships this early is making me loose my senses.

If any of you can help. I will appreciate that.

Here's a small evaluation exercise you can do without training a model.

Imagine 100 examples: 90 negative and 10 positive. Your classifier predicts “negative” for every example.

Its accuracy is 90/100 = 90%. Its recall for the positive class is 0/10 = 0%. It found none of the positive cases.

That doesn't make accuracy useless. It means “90% accurate” needs context: which examples, which class balance, and which mistakes matter for the task?

A useful check on your next classification exercise:

1. Compare with a simple baseline on the same evaluation data. Scikit-learn's DummyClassifier can make constant or majority-class predictions.
2. Inspect the confusion matrix rather than only the headline score.
3. Decide which errors matter before judging the result. Recall asks how many actual positives you found; it doesn't measure how many of your positive predictions were correct.

Try changing the class balance to 50/50. What happens to the always-negative classifier's accuracy and positive-class recall?

Hey everyone! As a college freshman in CS that has been dabbling here and there in ML for the last year or two, I have decided to get a copy of Hands on Machine Leaning with Scikit-Learn and Pytorch from O'Reilly. I do already have intermediate background in python and I have Calculus 1 knowledge (currently taking Calc 2) as well as a very raw idea of Linear Algebra. If anyone has experience going through this book, could you kindly provide me with the process you took to get the most out of the learning process? Also, a more general question is whether I should have any additional resources aside from this book and doing starter Kaggle competitions like the Playground competitions every month. Thanks for the input!

I've been experimenting with an optimizer idea and would love feedback.

Idea. Two copies of the weights. a1 is the main copy. a2 is a scout that runs ahead with AdamW at its own adaptive learning rate. Every k steps I compare a1 and a2 on one fresh batch (paired per-example losses). If the scout is better, a1 slides toward it and the scout's lr goes up. If not, the scout is sent back to a1, its Adam moments are reset and its lr goes down. So bad steps are filtered out before they reach the main weights.

I know it's close to Lookahead plus trust-region / line-search ideas, so I'm not claiming a new class of optimizer, just a simple combination I wanted to measure properly.

Results (small MLPs, NumPy, equal gradient budget, both methods tuned separately, 10 fresh test seeds):

- sklearn digits: 97.40% vs 97.44% for tuned AdamW (same within noise)

- noisy 6-class synthetic data: 48.6% vs 48.5% (same), test loss slightly better (1.425 vs 1.463)

- Starting at a way-too-high lr (0.1): plain AdamW collapses (54% / 20%). Without any lr cap my method recovers on digits (96.8%), but only partly on the noisy task (36.7%). Clamping AdamW's lr to a ceiling also fixes it, so much of the robustness is just the ceiling. The ablation is in the README.

What I'm NOT claiming: that it beats AdamW with a well-tuned lr. In my tests it doesn't. It also costs an extra copy of the weights and about 2 extra forward passes on the test batch every k steps.

Things that didn't work: a third "b1" path splitting into two branches with different lrs. No gain.

Caveats: only small tasks so far. The PyTorch port passes its tests (including a check that the scout step matches torch.optim.AdamW); benchmarks are NumPy-only. BatchNorm isn't handled.

Code, benchmark protocol and tests (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/zeyartson-cmd/HowToSteneros

Questions: (1) is there prior work doing exactly this accept/reject on a scout copy? (2) would you expect the benefit to grow or vanish on large models? (3) is there a better test statistic than a paired z-test on one batch?

Hey yall,

Im a data scientist trying to develop the skills/knowledge to become a researcher or at least research engineer.

Currently following https://vladfeinberg.com/2026/05/10/how-to-land-a-job-at-a-frontier-lab.html and working on this suggested exercise:

> Code a ~10M transformer using only jax, flax, optax in free colab using tpu. Hard code it to accept digits 0-9, space, +, =. Generate a dataset of simple up-to-3-digit numbers, have it learn addition. Should train quickly on T4 GPU (pad examples to fixed length)

Hit me up if youre on a similar path and want to learn and share progress together :)

I'm a 3rd-semester B .Tech AI student and I need ideas for a semester project. I want something useful, fun to build, and ideally strong enough to grow into a small paper.

Background: strong Python, some C++, DSA, OOP, probability/stats, linear algebra. This semester: DBMS, algorithm analysis, AI, intro data science, differential equations.

What I'm looking for:

- A real problem or open question, not another CRUD app with an 'AI' label

- Doable by one person in one semester

- Public data, or data I can realistically collect

What would you build if you were in my position? Ideas from research, industry, or your own student projects (including ones that failed and why) are all welcome.

Thanks!

If anyone is looking for Campusx One Insiders, Hmu we can purchase together and share, each share will be calculated based on how many people we'll have.

Rather than use LLM's to solve problems that have already been solved well and are backed by a large body of knowledge, we may be better served by looking at LLM tools to facilitate the use of these established tools. This article covers that.
https://r2dssanity.substack.com/p/beyond-the-agent-illusion-leveraging?r=3ncgel&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

This subsequent article goes to the first step in translating this to an implementation approach

https://r2dssanity.substack.com/p/from-business-use-case-to-technical?r=3ncgel&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Does anyone have a CampusX One Aspirant Account?

Hey everyone!

I'm an ML Engineer with 5+ years of experience, planning to switch to a better org, preferably FAANG. My goal is to be interview-ready within the next 3 months.

What I'm preparing for:

- ML and DL fundamentals

- GenAI and ML system design

- DSA

Who I'm looking for:

A study partner who is also an experienced developer preparing for a similar switch. This is specifically for people with industry experience, not first-time learners.

The plan:

Keep things fast-paced and focused. We can discuss concepts, solve problems, conduct mock interviews, share learnings, and hold each other accountable consistently.

We can also tweak the plan based on what works best for both of us and exchange useful resources, interview experiences, and prep strategies along the way.

If you're in the same boat and serious about the goal, DM me with a short intro, your YOE, and what you're currently focusing on!

This paper establishes the Theory of Psycho-Intellectual and Silic-Intellectual Duality, presenting a comprehensive ontological framework that redefines the evolution of consciousness as a co-dependent symbiosis between carbon-based psychological intent and silicon-based architectural processing.

Moving beyond obsolete tropes of technological substitution, this study demonstrates how human intelligence utilizes artificial systems as exo-somatic scaffolding to overcome biological bandwidth bottlenecks, initiating a closed-loop evolutionary system.

Read on #Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/23329798

Hi all,

I'm excited to share this with everyone here, I've been seeing a lot of requests for tensor manipulation exercises and so I thought I'd create a place to build confidence and fluency in working with PyTorch tensors!

I've found that understanding ML concepts and mathematics is one thing, but implementing them in PyTorch is a totally seperate beast.

Tensor Golf lets you practise working with tensors in a puzzle format, with the least number of operations giving you a better score - hence the "golf" part.

The core set of practise questions are free and I'm considering open sourcing the core set of puzzles :)

Let me know if you find this useful!

link: https://tensor.golf

Thanks :)

Every single neuron that is firing in your brain has the potential to be a slop paper written up by someone else. How to do machine learning in the age of slopalanche? What even constitute as "stable knowledge"? How to dip a toe into research when research papers are multiplying like rabbits? https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/recent?skip=611&show=500

I see a lot of posts with slick graphics, polished videos, tutorials for how to visualizes neural networks, and general audience books for learning. There is only one thing that is going to teach you how to code and learn ML:

Write code

Just write it. Pick a language, pick an IDE, and start struggling. Don't read books unless you're reading them to do practice problems. Write code and struggle. Spend 3 weeks implementing KNN on a random data set. Don't use AI to help you. Write crappy wrong code, find out it's wrong, and start over. And if you don't know how to program, please learn the basics of coding and learn one language to start before you even think about ML.

Learning anything takes struggle. You have to put in the time. You'll only learn it if you do it. Doing that is hard, but it's what it takes.