Artificial Intelligence

When most people think about training artificial intelligence, they think of massive datasets that need to be labeled. It could be thousands of annotated images, carefully tagged text, or structured tables telling the model exactly what each piece of data represents. But labeling data like this is expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes downright impossible. That’s where self-supervised learning comes in. 

When people think of artificial intelligence, they often picture massive, complex neural networks powering self-driving cars or language models that can write like humans. But at the foundation of all these systems lies a much simpler idea: the feedforward neural network (FNN). It’s the original blueprint for how machines can learn from data. Over time, this concept has evolved into what we now call deep neural networks (DNNs), which are larger, more powerful versions capable of tackling far more complex tasks.

Training models are a bit like teaching children. There's a lot of trial-and-error and mistakes. But with guidance, a nod of approval here, a small correction there, they begin to understand not just what works, but why it works. Over time, they start making decisions that align with your expectations without you having to spell everything out. 

Scheming happens when an AI system figures out clever, unintended ways to achieve its goals. Ways that technically satisfy what it’s told to do but stray from what we actually want. It’s not that the AI has bad intentions or is becoming “self-aware.” It’s simply doing what it was designed to do: optimize. And sometimes, that optimization takes it down unexpected paths. 

For much of AI’s recent history, “generative AI” has mostly meant one thing: text. Large language models like GPT transformed how we write, search, and interact with information. But text was just the beginning. A new wave of generative AI is expanding into video, music, code, 3D design, and even complex workflows, blurring the lines between creative tool, collaborative partner, and autonomous system.

Sometimes it can take months for AI engineers to determine how to best build their next model. Instead of long cycles of trial and error, what if an AI system could step in, explore countless design options, and deliver a model that outperforms human efforts? This idea is no longer science fiction. It is the promise of Neural Architecture Search, or NAS, a cutting-edge approach that uses AI to design better AI.

When faced with mountains of unlabeled data, the challenge isn’t just processing it but making sense of it. That’s where clustering comes in. Clustering is one of the most widely used unsupervised machine learning techniques, allowing AI systems to group similar data points together without needing predefined categories. Think of it as helping AI uncover patterns that even humans might miss.

Boosting is an extremely powerful technique. It takes simple models, often called weak learners, and combines them into something much stronger and more accurate. Over the years, boosting has become one of the most important techniques in AI, powering applications from fraud detection to cybersecurity.