North Coast Synthesis Ltd.

Tag: basics

What's a Model?

2025-09-01 Video alignment basics theory text Gemma hallucination What do we actually mean when we talk about a "model"? Where do they come from? How much do they cost? What are prompts, loss functions, and fine-tuning? This extra-long introductory talk covers some of the basic concepts in the AI landscape, with a special focus on chatbots. Access: Public

Rotary Position Encoding

2025-08-18 Video basics text AIAYN tokenization I review position encoding - why it's needed, and how classic Transformers do it - and then go in detail into the Rotary Positioning Embedding (RoPE) enhancement to position encoding. RoPE is widely used in recent large language models. Access: $ Basic

Believable sampling with Mirostat

2025-08-11 Video Poll basics text sampling It's often hard to choose the right sampling parameters for language generation. This paper introduces Mirostat, a technique for adaptively choosing the value of "k" in top-k sampling to give easier and more consistent control over the information density of the output. Access: $ Basic

Grammar is all you get

2025-08-01 Video model-intro basics text AIAYN attention An overview of the classic "Attention is all you need" paper, with focus on the attention mechanism and its resemblance to dependency grammar. Access: $ Basic

Cheap fine-tuning with LoRA

2025-08-01 Video basics training text image GPT LoRA Rather than re-training the entire large matrices of a model, we can train smaller, cheaper adjustments that function like software patches. Access: $$$ Pro

Dog-whistle GANs

2025-05-21 Video basics training security theory image GAN Generative Adversarial Nets, and their implications for watermarking generated text. Access: Public