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Social Learning and Biases
In our pursuit to perfect neural networks, we often look to how humans learn for reference, which has had varying degrees of success....
Ethan Smith
Jun 45 min read
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The Edge of Stability
Many facets of our universe seem to gravitate towards unstable, chaotic equilibria. One such example is criticality, a threshold where a...
Ethan Smith
Jun 46 min read
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Recurrent Parameterless Attention is a Consensus Algorithm
In another post, I wrote about parameterless (boneless) attention as a means of mixing information across datapoints weighted by their...
Ethan Smith
May 242 min read
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The mean preference is a bad estimate of preferences.
I felt compelled to make this post after seeing yet another reinforcement learning paper for diffusion models that does spectacularly in...
Ethan Smith
May 186 min read
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Is everything becoming the same?
Lately, I've felt that a lot of human culture is becoming the same. Groups have become very hive-minded and homogenous on an...
Ethan Smith
May 104 min read
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Life in the Middle and After AGI
We are racing toward an uncertain future that draws nearer every day. We have a rough idea of what the future could look like. I'm...
Ethan Smith
Apr 1634 min read
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How do we tackle noisy recognition?
Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how humans handle noisy recognition. Maybe you recognize the image above, if not you...
Ethan Smith
Apr 913 min read
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Stone Age Psychiatry
Once upon a time, I was set on becoming a psychiatrist. I had always been deeply interested in psychology. Throughout life, I've spent...
Ethan Smith
Apr 831 min read
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On Vibe Coding
The Distillery - a look under the hood of vibe coding Introduction Vibe coding may be one of the best and worst things 2025 has had to...
Ethan Smith
Mar 289 min read
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Boneless Attention and Low Rank Attention Layers
I’ve seen a lot of convoluted tutorials on attention but nothing really made it click for me more as understanding as mixing a projected...
Ethan Smith
Mar 238 min read
530 views
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There are probably a lot of special people.
One conviction I hold very strongly is that "special" people are possibly much more common than we may be lead to believe. While sure, we...
Ethan Smith
Mar 2113 min read
140 views
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The Need for Relative Optimizers | Hypothesis on Muon
Presently, most optimizers used in deep learning do not explicitly accommodate their updates with respect to the expected range of...
Ethan Smith
Mar 1811 min read
533 views
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Minimum Faith
Within the study of machine learning, you'll often hear that the objective is to find the solution that maximizes likelihood . We have a...
Ethan Smith
Mar 148 min read
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Softmax Attention is a Fluke
Calibrated Attention Calibrated Attention NanoGPT Attention is the magic ingredient of modern neural networks. It is the core of what has...
Ethan Smith
Mar 1310 min read
5,258 views
1 comment


Discrete Diffusion Sudoku and Diffusion Lore
A short attempt at a small portion of the diffusion Family Tree https://www.canva.com/design/DAGgnVB3x2s/b52Y3Kg-frWdRlPzI3_5pA/edit?utm_...
Ethan Smith
Mar 35 min read
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Kolmogorov Complexity
Mandelbrot function: Zn+1 = (Zn)^2 + C | Location: -1.4732524061369524549 + -0.0058138265122775765014 i , Radius:...
Ethan Smith
Mar 114 min read
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To create something new, you need to make some noise.
One of the most interesting things about the development of AI was the order of achieved milestones. Relatively small models can create...
Ethan Smith
Feb 127 min read
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How I like to think about diffusion
It's a bit hard to see in the diagram but in addition to being convolved with a gaussian, these points are also drifting towards zero....
Ethan Smith
Jan 264 min read
318 views
1 comment


Classifier free guidance and reinforcement learning
https://sweet-hall-e72.notion.site/Classifier-Free-Guidance-to-Approximate-RL-9f78c02801c6434da61f37c8d843c5bf
Ethan Smith
Jan 261 min read
101 views
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The Tough Case for Free Will
"Would someone without free will do this?" is one of the most common responses I've heard to the proposition that free will might not...
Ethan Smith
Jan 1311 min read
102 views
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