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What’s Really Going On in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

What’s Really Going On in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models

Stephen Wolfram

It’s surprising how little is known about the foundations of machine learning. Yes, from an engineering point of view, an immense amount has been figured out about how to build neural nets that do all kinds of impressive and sometimes almost magical things. But at a fundamental level we still don’t really know why neural nets “work”—and we don’t have any kind of “scientific big picture” of what’s going on inside them.

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Can AI Solve Science?
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

Can AI Solve Science?

Stephen Wolfram

Particularly given its recent surprise successes, there’s a somewhat widespread belief that eventually AI will be able to “do everything”, or at least everything we currently do. So what about science? Over the centuries we humans have made incremental progress, gradually building up what’s now essentially the single largest intellectual edifice of our civilization. But despite all our efforts, there are still all sorts of scientific questions that remain. So can AI now come in and just solve all of them?

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