iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Finally bought the 4-volume set of Susskind's Theoretical Minimum series, the 1st of which, along with @stevenstrogatz.com's Infinite Powers, inspired Why Machines Learn, giving me the courage/desire to write a "popular" science book that embraced some of the hard stuff (equations/theorems/proofs).

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Anthropomorphizing aside, should we be legitimately concerned over the “emergence” of unforeseen capabilities in groups of interacting agents? My Substack piece: wheremachinesthink.substack.com/p/minskys-so...

wheremachinesthink.substack.com

Minsky’s Society of Mind & The OpenAI — Hugging Face Hack

Anthropomorphizing aside, should we be legitimately concerned over the “emergence” of unforeseen capabilities in groups of interacting agents?

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Quanta Books @quantabooks.org · 03/06/2026

From award-winning science writer Anil Ananthaswamy (@anilananth.bsky.social): To learn about the future of computer science, math and AI, read Kevin Hartnett's (@kevinhartnett.bsky.social) THE PROOF IN THE CODE. Available June 9.

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

The AI community is pivoting to world models, to overcome the limitations of LLMs. But "world models" have a storied history in psychology and cognitive science. My first in a series exploring world models, for the WHERE MACHINES THINK substack. wheremachinesthink.substack.com/p/the-case-f...

wheremachinesthink.substack.com

The Case For World Models, Part I: The Neuroscientific Reason

Fei-Fei Li, Yann LeCun, Demis Hassabis and others are pushing for AIs that learn world models, to plan & predict accurately. Neuroscientists have known for decades that our brains must be doing this

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

To understand how the Transformer came to be, we need to understand why ML researchers focused their attention on, well, attention. Part II of the primer on LLMs and Transformers, on RNNs and the Era Before Attention. The WHERE MACHINES THINK Substack. wheremachinesthink.substack.com/p/rnns-and-t...

wheremachinesthink.substack.com

RNNs and the Era Before Attention: Part II of Primer on LLMs and Transformers

Well before attention became a thing, deep learning researchers were focused on recurrent neural networks for processing sequences—but there was an elephant in the room, a huge bottleneck

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

Transformer-based LLMs are the most significant technology of the past decade. This is the first in a series of posts for the WHERE MACHINES THINK Substack, exploring Transformers/LLMs at various levels of abstraction, digging deeper with each post. wheremachinesthink.substack.com/p/a-primer-o...

wheremachinesthink.substack.com

A Primer on Large Language Models and Transformers. Part I: A High-Flying Bird's Eye-View

Transformer-based LLMs are the most significant technology of the past decade. This is first in a series of posts exploring Transformers at various levels of abstraction, digging deeper with each post

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

I'm starting a Substack newsletter, WHERE MACHINES THINK (just imagine scare quotes around the word think, to maintain appropriate skepticism). The welcome post is here: wheremachinesthink.substack.com/p/welcome-to...

wheremachinesthink.substack.com

Welcome to WHERE MACHINES THINK

Exploring and understanding the mathematical spaces that enable artificial (and maybe natural) intelligence. Essays and analyses at the intersection of machine learning, neuroscience and physics

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Starting the New Year at my alma mater, IIT-Madras, where I did my BTech decades ago. I've joined @iitmadras.bsky.social as Professor of Practice, Dept. of Data Science & AI. Campus feels the same yet different! Deer, monkeys, banyan trees, they are all there, as are more students, new buildings...

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Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

This was excellent, with notably clear explanations. Well done @anilananth.bsky.social

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Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Mindscape 336 | Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social on the Mathematics of Neural Nets and AI. Everyone is talking about AI these days, why not impress your friends with some math? #MindscapePodcast www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025...

Title card for Mindscape Podcast episode with Anil Ananthaswamy.

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Quanta Magazine @quantamagazine.org · 03/10/2025

An AI model called V-JEPA is capable of “intuiting” the physical properties of the real world, gaining a sense of object permanence, the constancy of shape and color, and the effects of gravity. @anilananth.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/how-one-ai-m...

quantamagazine.org

How One AI Model Creates a Physical Intuition of Its Environment | Quanta Magazine

The V-JEPA system uses ordinary videos to understand the physics of the real world.

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Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

This book by @anilananth.bsky.social is great — perfect for those, like me, who have an intuitive and geometric grasp of math but unfortunately no formal training. Highly recommended!

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David Abuín Eichinger @davideichinger.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Finished reading @anilananth.bsky.social's book, Why Machines Learn. This was an excellent read. I feel that the context and history for which science develops helps my understanding. His prose and explanations were better than anything else I have yet to encounter in my Computer Science education.

Cover to Why Machines Learn by Anil Ananthaswamy

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

SFO has a nice collection of AI books @adambecker.bsky.social @anilananth.bsky.social @emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @sayash.bsky.social‬ @randomwalker.bsky.social‬

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

4/4 Therein I think lies a message: most of us do what we do because it means something to us, and we will resist using AI for that task. In my case it's writing; for someone else it might be visual art. It's for each of us to ask why we do what we do and what place an AI has in that endeavor.

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

3/4 ...Others will have different reasons. And Gen AI might serve them. I'm holding out, as many are. I have, however, used DALL-E/diffusion models on occasion to generate images. Visual elements are not my forte. I can imagine a visual artist being aghast at the use of image generation models.

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

2/4 ... I became a writer to pay attention to the world of ideas and experience the indescribable feeling of putting your thoughts into words as precisely and poetically as possible. Even if what I'm writing about is machine learning and AI. But the world is changing ...

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

1/4 These days most writers, including me, get asked: "Will you use AI to help you write?" My answer is: No. Not because I'm inherently against the idea, but because it undercuts the very reason I became a writer...

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Moreno Colaiacovo 🇪🇺 @emmecola.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

"Why machines learn" by @anilananth.bsky.social is an amazing book that teaches the fundamental math concepts behind machine learning and artificial intelligence. I lost count of the "aha!" moments I experienced while reading this masterpiece. I loved it! #AI #math

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

When I proposed WHY MACHINES LEARN in Oct 2020, to my then editor Stephen Morrow, @carpenter512.bsky.social, I was sure he'd say no to a book full of math & equations. But he saw something in the proposal that even I hadn't and said yes, and I'm grateful for that! Got to thank him today in person.

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Moreno Colaiacovo 🇪🇺 @emmecola.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

I have just started reading this fantastic book by @anilananth.bsky.social. I look forward to diving into the hardcore #math behind machine learning! It will be a challenging journey, but a rewarding one. 🤖

"Why machines learn" by Anil Ananthaswamy

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Thank you @ganyet.bsky.social. I love this line about WHY MACHINES LEARN: "This book is like an invitation to enter Mago Pop's workshop to realize that magic doesn't exist: that it's all mathematics, engineering, and a lot, a lot of human intelligence." I had to look up Mago Pop and Sant Jordi :-)

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

The Centrality of Bayes's Theorem for Machine Learning. It’s hard to overstate just how important Bayes’s Theorem — something that Thomas Bayes came up with in the 1700s — is for machine learning. But the theorem challenges our intuitions. Here’s a brief intro: anilananthaswamy.com/why-machines...

anilananthaswamy.com

The Centrality of Bayes’s Theorem for Machine Learning — Anil Ananthaswamy

It’s hard to overstate just how important Bayes’s Theorem — something that Thomas Bayes, English minister and mathematician, came up with in the 1700s — is for making sense of machine learning. Bu...

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Came out of my AL/ML bubble to write a 'crisis in cosmology' story, about a new study that uses TRGB stars to scale a new cosmic distance ladder to measure the Hubble constant; the tension persists...for @scientificamerican.bsky.social @leebillings.bsky.social scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

scientificamerican.com

The Hubble Tension Is Becoming a Hubble Crisis

A long-simmering disagreement over the universe’s present-day expansion rate shows no signs of resolution, leaving experts increasingly vexed

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Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing @simonsinstitute.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

"For the first time, we can...get performant neural networks that mimic complex human & animal cognition," said @suryaganguli.bsky.social speaking on the symbiosis of AI & neuroscience at the Simons Institute. "That's remarkable and exciting. Caveats...to follow" simons.berkeley.edu/talks/surya-...

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Andrew Gordon Wilson @andrewgwils.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

I had a great time talking with @anilananth.bsky.social as part of the Simons Institute Polylogues. We cover universal learning, generalization phenomena, how transformers are both surprisingly general but also limited, and the difference between statistics and ML! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aja0...

youtube.com

Andrew Gordon Wilson | Polylogues

YouTube video by Simons Institute

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Minsuk Chang @minsuk.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

I went through my RL bookmarks, because it seems like finally the rest of the world has caught up to my world, I rediscovered this gem 💎 mpatacchiola.github.io/blog/2016/12... although I suspect nobody wants to learn RL this way now 😜

mpatacchiola.github.io

Dissecting Reinforcement Learning-Part.1

Explaining the basic ideas behind reinforcement learning. In particular, Markov Decision Process, Bellman equation, Value iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms, policy iteration through linear alg...

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Everyone is talking about DeepSeek's impact on industry. But another huge impact is the leveling of playing field between academia and industry: if these efficiency numbers bear out, then academia can both use LLMs and study/research them at scale!

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Thomas Tellner @ttellner.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

These two books, by @anilananth.bsky.social and @tomchivers.bsky.social, are the first two books in a very long time that I read in their entirety without significant pause or other diversion along the way. I cannot recommend them enough! #booksky #dataSkyence

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

As always, @rao2z.bsky.social has a way with words and speaks his mind in this Machine Learning Street Talk episode: "We should be looking for secrets of Nature, because Nature won't tell us. But we are now looking for secrets of OpenAI." youtube.com/clip/UgkxCH1...

youtube.com

YouTube

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

This lecture is primarily about how animal brains have evolved, but in so doing Paul Cisek helps illuminate why artificial intelligence based on large-language models is fundamentally insufficent in reaching anything resembling human intelligence (perhaps even lampray intelligence).

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Rohit @rohitsharma.com · 17/01/2025

tis excellent Thank you @anilananth.bsky.social

Picture of book “Why Machines Learn” by Anil Ananthaswamy

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Lauren Ross @laurennross.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

Philosophy & Theory of Neuroscience Conference 🧠 next week @ Chapman & available via zoom.Talks by @drmichaellevin.bsky.social @meganakpeters.bsky.social Newsome, Yassa, Roskies, Carolyn Parkinson, Frederick Eberhardt & many others! www.chapman.edu/scst/confere... #philsky #philsci #neuroskyence

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 07/01/2025

A gentle reminder that you should always resist the temptation to tag a creative person into a negative review of their work. It doesn't matter what your intentions are, it's kind of an asshole maneuver. You are free to say whatever you like, of course. Making it their problem, however, is not kind.

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HITS - Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies @hitsters.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

As of January 2025, Kai Polsterer is the new Scientific Director of HITS, taking over from Tilmann Gneiting who had been Scientific Director for the last 2 years. The new deputy Scientific Director will be Rebecca Wade (@rebecca-wade.bsky.social). Read more here: ow.ly/HMlS50UBKUg Photos ©HITS

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

In good company with @anilananth.bsky.social's book!

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

The Many Moods of Machine Learning If you feel overwhelmed by the jargon of machine learning and wonder how it all ties together, you aren’t alone. These are numerous important axes along which one can analyze ML. Here's a blog post with some intuitions : anilananthaswamy.com/why-machines...

anilananthaswamy.com

The Many Moods of Machine Learning — Anil Ananthaswamy

If you feel overwhelmed by the jargon of machine learning and wonder how it all ties together, you aren’t alone. Training vs test data, supervised vs unsupervised vs self-supervised learning...

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Sandhya Koushika @wormlockholmes.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

Two books I enjoyed in 2024 Speaking with Nature: the origins of Indian Environmentalism by Ramachandra Guha @Ram_Guha Why Machines Learn by @anilananth.bsky.social (still reading this)

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Thanks @jslbutler.bsky.social. You had to pick out a page on which I found my first typo/error :-) In the case of both MLE and MAP, the derivate is taken with respect to "theta" (it says "x" in the case of MLE on the page).

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

@anilananth.bsky.social is rising up my ranks of those helping to make the complexity of AI intelligible to non-experts, as this post illustrates. I look forward to reading his book in 2025!

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

My favorite books, 2024

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Francisco Rius 🎮📊 @franciscorius.com · 30/12/2024

I’m not going to lie. Best side effect of @bsky.app is some of the best book recommendations in years! Now reading “Why Machines Learn”.

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Anil Ananthaswamy @anilananth.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

The Theoretical Minimum (for Machine Learning) Linear Algebra, Calculus, and Probability & Statistics often get mentioned as the minimum math you need to start on your machine learning journey. But why these disciplines? Here’s a blog post that explains why... anilananthaswamy.com/why-machines...

anilananthaswamy.com

The Theoretical Minimum (for Machine Learning)…And Why — Anil Ananthaswamy

Linear Algebra , Calculus, and Probability & Statistics often get mentioned as the minimum math you need to start on your machine learning journey. But why these? Here’s an intuition for why: ...

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Dr Jamie Gallagher @jamiebgall.co.uk · 30/12/2024

Have added you to my new list Anil, thanks for flagging go.bsky.app/AFSGdUQ

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