After Orthogonality: Virtue-Ethical Agency and AI Alignment
The Gradientby Peli Grietzer18 Feb 2026
Preface This essay argues that rational people don’t have goals, and that rational AIs shouldn’t have goals.
The Gradient
thegradient.pubadded August 2026
2%AGI Is Not Multimodal
The Gradientby Benjamin A. Spiegel4 Jun 2025
"In projecting language back as the model for thought, we lose sight of the tacit embodied understanding that undergirds our intelligence."
Shape, Symmetries, and Structure: The Changing Role of Mathematics in Machine Learning Research
The Gradientby Henry Kvinge16 Nov 2024
What is the Role of Mathematics in Modern Machine Learning? The past decade has witnessed a shift in how progress is made in machine learning.
What's Missing From LLM Chatbots: A Sense of Purpose
The Gradientby Kenneth Li9 Sept 2024
LLM-based chatbots’ capabilities have been advancing every month. These improvements are mostly measured by benchmarks like MMLU, HumanEval, and MATH (e.g. sonnet 3.5, gpt-4o).
We Need Positive Visions for AI Grounded in Wellbeing
The Gradientby Joel Lehman3 Aug 2024
Introduction Imagine yourself a decade ago, jumping directly into the present shock of conversing naturally with an encyclopedic AI that crafts images, writes code, and debates philosophy.
Financial Market Applications of LLMs
The Gradientby Richard Dewey20 Apr 2024
The AI revolution drove frenzied investment in both private and public companies and captured the public’s imagination in 2023.
A Brief Overview of Gender Bias in AI
The Gradientby Yennie Jun8 Apr 2024
AI models reflect, and often exaggerate, existing gender biases from the real world. It is important to quantify such biases present in models in order to properly address and mitigate them.
Mamba Explained
The Gradientby Kola Ayonrinde28 Mar 2024
The State Space Model taking on Transformers Right now, AI is eating the world. And by AI, I mean Transformers.
Car-GPT: Could LLMs finally make self-driving cars happen?
The Gradientby Jérémy Cohen8 Mar 2024
In 1928, London was in the middle of a terrible health crisis, devastated by bacterial diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis, and meningitis.
Do text embeddings perfectly encode text?
The Gradientby Jack Morris5 Mar 2024
The rise of the vector database As a result of the rapid advancement of generative AI in recent years, many companies are rushing to integrate AI into their businesses.
Why Doesn’t My Model Work?
The Gradientby Michael Lones24 Feb 2024
Have you ever trained a model you thought was good, but then it failed miserably when applied to real world data? If so, you’re in good company.
Deep learning for single-cell sequencing: a microscope to see the diversity of cells
The Gradientby Fatima Zahra El Hajji13 Jan 2024
The history of each living being is written in its genome, which is stored as DNA and present in nearly every cell of the body.
Salmon in the Loop
The Gradientby Kevin McCraney16 Dec 2023
One of the most fascinating problems that a computer scientist may be lucky enough to encounter is a complex sociotechnical problem in a field going through the process of digital transformation.
Neural algorithmic reasoning
The Gradientby Petar Veličković14 Oct 2023
In this article, we will talk about classical computation: the kind of computation typically found in an undergraduate Computer Science course on Algorithms and Data Structures [1].
The Artificiality of Alignment
The Gradientby Jessica Dai7 Oct 2023
This essay first appeared in Reboot. Credulous, breathless coverage of “AI existential risk” (abbreviated “x-risk”) has reached the mainstream.