LLMs
Large language models: what they are, how they work, and what they are good for.
10 essays, newest first
- The Lock You Cannot Pick: Do AI Safety Barriers Cap Intelligence? Do AI safety guardrails make models less capable? Crude ones can, measurably, and in a lab test a penalized model hid its intent. Reasons seem to cost less.
- The Infinite Review Every AI reviewer finds one more critical finding, because finding problems looks like work. The bias is human first. The fix is not a better prompt, it is a file: how we gave our reviews a terminal state.
- The Child and the Stars Clarke described a superintelligence with the mind of a child in 1956, and wrote down both endings. We built the powerful half and skipped the parenting. What the research says about raising it instead of restricting it. Part 14 of Not So Artificial.
- Europe Is Running on Rented Intelligence Beijing is moving to wall off its best AI models. The open era is closing, and Europe's real choice is now to build its own intelligence or keep renting its sovereignty.
- The AI Glossary: Every Term Explained in Plain English RAG, LLM, embeddings, fine-tuning, agents, MLOps, GEO: every AI term you need to understand, defined in two sentences and explained in plain English. Bookmark this page.
- What is Fine-Tuning in Easy Words Fine-tuning in plain words: what it changes in an AI model, when to use it instead of RAG, and when a small specialist model can beat a big one.
- What is an LLM in Easy Words An LLM (Large Language Model) is an AI trained on massive amounts of text that can generate human-like responses, answer questions, and reason about language. Here is what it is, how it works, and why it matters (without the math).
- The Loop of Attention: Why AI Hallucinates Why AI hallucinates and demos break in production: a model that loses the thread guesses instead of saying I don't know. How to keep an agent on its question.
- The Method Actor: What a Role Does to an AI's Mind Telling a model to 'act as an expert' is not flattery and not magic. A role picks which of the model's many voices speaks and narrows its attention, the way a method actor, or a child in a cape, narrows into a character. The opening of Not So Artificial.
- Observation Is the Cut: Quantum Collapse, Memory, and AI A quantum physics analogy for the mind and AI: observation as a cut, memory as a stored forecast, and a language model that braces for the next word. A notebook idea walked as far as physics allows, with the science marked.
