Back in 1817 David Ricardo published a very influential theory on an interesting question: Why trade, and particularly why trade when you are better at producing something than other countries?

Language modelling is one of the great ideas in ML: if you train a model to accurately predict the next word in a sequence of text¹, you are forcing it to learn a deep structure for human language. Because language is how we map reality, hopefully then you can do many useful things. This turned out to be right!

I don’t think even the most perceptive forecaster would have identified a 90s LucasArts video format being a flashpoint for a discussion of the state of the security. We live in an age of generative AI agents rampaging through OSS though, and that seems to be what has happened.

Serious scientists use FP64 – 64 bit floating point numbers – for high precision simulations, but in the world of machine learning we got by for the longest time with FP32. The perennial quest for increased FLOPS, particularly when memory bound, made even that seem too expensive though.

Helion: A High-Level DSL for Performant and Portable ML Kernels – PyTorch

GPT4o’s image generation was a remarkable event, beyond the brief Ghiblification of all social media.GPT-4o offered significantly more steerability than earlier image generation models,, while offering image quality in the ball park of the best diffusion models. Qwen-Image gives a similar level of fidelity and accuracy and is an open-weights model with a pretty decent technical report: QwenLM/Qwen-Image.

There’s a chart making the rounds that caused Tim Lee over at Understanding AI to rewrite his recent (excellent!) article aboutthe impact of AI on jobs. MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues found¹ that young workers in AI-exposed jobs² have seen their employment drop by 13% since ChatGPT arrived. Meanwhile, their older colleagues in the same fields are doing just fine.

A Primer on LLM Post-Training – PyTorch

You could have invented CuTe hierarchical layout (but maybe not the rest of it?) : ezyang’s blog