If you've ever asked ChatGPT to write you a joke and gotten virtually the same setup-punchline combo every time, you've experienced what researchers call "mode collapse"—the AI equivalent of a one-track mind. Research published this week identifies the root cause of this repetitive behavior and proposes an elegantly simple solution: just ask the model to...
Category: Science
LoRA Without Regret: A Practitioner’s Guide to Reliable Fine-Tuning
In the early days of adapter-based tuning, LoRA often felt like a charming hack—efficient, plausible, but with a nagging question: would performance always trail full fine-tuning? New research from Thinking Machines, led by John Schulman (co-founder of OpenAI and creator of the PPO algorithm), argues that the difference is not inevitable. Under the right regime,...
Accidental Lovers: How ChatGPT Became the World’s Biggest Companion AI
As GPT-5 rollouts trigger genuine grief among users, researchers document the first large-scale analysis of human-AI intimacy The 2013 film Her anticipated today's reality more accurately than it first appeared. In the movie, Theodore purchases an advanced OS for help and companionship during a difficult divorce—not explicitly seeking romance. The love story emerges organically from...
Why your “reproducible” AI keeps changing its mind
Ask ChatGPT the same question twice with temperature set to zero and a fixed seed—settings that should guarantee identical responses—and you'll likely get different answers. It's a phenomenon so common that most AI practitioners have learned to live with it, chalking it up to the inherent messiness of neural networks running on parallel hardware. Mira...
Why AI Keeps Making Stuff Up: The Real Reason Language Models Hallucinate
Picture this: You ask a state-of-the-art AI chatbot for someone's birthday, specifically requesting an answer only if it actually knows. The AI confidently responds with three different dates across three attempts—all wrong. The correct answer? None of the confident fabrications even landed in the right season. This isn't a glitch. According new research from OpenAI,...
AI Gets Its “I Know Kung Fu” Moment: Researchers Create Instant Expertise Downloads for Language Models
Remember that iconic scene in The Matrix where Neo gets martial arts expertise instantly downloaded into his brain, then opens his eyes and declares "I know kung fu"? Researchers have essentially created the AI equivalent of that moment. A team of scientists has developed Memory Decoder, a breakthrough technique that can instantly grant language models...
The Janitor’s Induction Machine: Rediscovering Peter Putnam’s Logic of Mind
December 1987. A bicycle goes down on East Main Street in Houma, Louisiana. The rider—a night janitor—dies. Two blocks away, his cramped apartment holds thousands of typed pages. Diagrams, memos, manuscripts—all sketching what he called a "calculus of mind." Here's the kicker: this janitor wasn't just any custodian. Peter Putnam had studied with John Archibald...
The Agentic Web: How Autonomous AI Agents Could Reshape the Internet’s Next Era
The internet is on the cusp of a new transformation. After the static pages of the PC Web and the mobile app explosion of the last decade, a third era is emerging – one defined not by humans clicking links or scrolling feeds, but by autonomous AI agents acting on our behalf. Researchers are calling...
Microsoft’s TinyTroupe Gets Major Update: Digital Humans for Business Insights
Microsoft's experimental TinyTroupe library has evolved significantly since its initial release, with a major academic paper and the recent 0.4.0 update transforming what started as an internal hackathon project into a sophisticated toolkit for simulating human behavior. The open-source Python library lets businesses create virtual focus groups, test advertisements on synthetic audiences, and generate realistic data—all without the cost and complexity of traditional market research.
AI Just Declared Humans the Bottleneck in Research – And Built a System to Fix It
Imagine an artificial intelligence so advanced it decides that humanity, for all its brilliance, is actually slowing down its own progress. Then, it proceeds to design a system to conduct scientific research autonomously, from hypothesis to testing, fundamentally changing how we develop AI. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the bold claim emerging from a new...
