AI

Friends without friction

Companion chatbots may weaken our ability to navigate conflict and difference—unless we make key design choices, says a new report

We, as humans, sometimes receive streams of tokens and produce tokens in response, forming words, sentences, lines of code ... but always with the ability to peek outside the stream and check in with ground-floor reality. We pause and consider: does this word really stand for the thing I intend it to stand for? Does this sentence capture the real... See more

In 2021, researchers made a striking discovery while training a series of tiny models on toy tasks [1]. They found a set of models that suddenly flipped from memorizing their training data to correctly generalizing on unseen inputs after training for much longer. This phenomenon – where generalization seems to happen abruptly and long after fitting... See more