By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 22/08/2026These forces and accidents have acted on AI in ways that profoundly shaped its development. The latest AI boom started when a group of machine learning researchers tried a minor variation on existing techniques and saw a *major* improvement in the outcomes. 28/ 1521
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 22/08/2026This is one of the most exciting kinds of breakthrough: if tweaking a single variable in a small way produces a large improvement, then it may be that further tweaking will produce even more improvements. 29/ 1421
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 22/08/2026The minor variation that produced the major improvement in AI performance was *scale*. Prior to the "deep learning" era, AI research relied on a mix of hand-built models of reality and training data that computers fitted into those models. 30/ 1361