North Coast Synthesis Ltd.

Tag: theory

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

Original diffusion: Adding noise to remove it

2025-08-04 Video theory image diffusion Some of the underlying theory for diffusion-type models, which have become popular for image generation. This paper is one of the original sources for the diffusion approach, not introduction of a specific model but the very general abstract concepts used in subsequent models. Access: Free account (logged in)

Embeddings from generative models

2025-08-01 Video theory applications attention Mistral For text generation you usually want a "decoder" model; for other text tasks you usually want an "encoder." Here we look at modifying a decoder model to change it into an encoder. Access: $ Basic

Features are not what you think

2025-08-01 Video theory security image Two interesting things about neural network image classifiers: one, the individual neurons don't seem to be special in terms of detecting meaningful features; and two, it's frighteningly easy to construct adversarial examples that will fool the classification. Access: $ Basic

Better (than) tokenization with BLTs

2025-08-01 Video theory text LLaMA tokenization Using "patches" of input bytes, instead of a fixed token list, allows better scalability and improves performance on some tasks that are hard for token-based LLMs. Access: $ Basic

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