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Many Agents, Many Problems (The Agents Season, Episode 8)
Whether you work best solo or thrive in a team, you know collaboration is complicated — and it turns out AI agents face the same tensions. This episode dives into multi-agent systems, exploring how…
How Do You Evaluate An AI Agent? (The Agents Season, Episode 7)
Knowing when an AI agent has failed sounds straightforward — until it isn't. Agents have a frustrating habit of finishing confidently while quietly doing the wrong thing, or looping endlessly without…
AI Agent Failure Modes (The Agents Season, Episode 6)
Despite what the marketing hype might suggest, AI agents are far from infallible — and if you've ever actually used one, you already know this. Today's episode dives deep into the many, varied, and…
Agentic Planning (The Agents Season, Episode 5)
When tackling a complex, multi-step task, even the smartest AI agent can fail without a solid game plan. This episode dives into the research around agentic planning — how agents move beyond simply…
Memory Management for AI Agents (The Agents Season, Episode 4)
Context windows are powerful — but finite, and surprisingly easy to overwhelm. When an AI agent is tackling a long, complex task, the information it needs has to fit inside that limited real estate,…
Lost in the Middle (The Agents Season, Episode 3)
Just like a memorable talk lives or dies by its opening and closing, LLMs have a surprisingly similar quirk: they pay close attention to what's at the beginning and end of their context window — and…
ReAct and Tool Usage (The Agents Season, Episode 2)
Before 2022, there was a wall between AI and the real world — models could reason impressively, but couldn't look anything up, run code, or check whether anything they said was actually true. This…
What's an AI Agent? And Why's That Hard to Define? (The Agents Season, Episode 1)
AI agents are having a moment — and unpacking them properly takes more than a single conversation. This episode kicks off a dedicated multi-part season exploring AI agents from every angle, building…
Unfaithful Chain of Thought
What's actually happening when an LLM "thinks out loud"? Research on human decision-making suggests that much of the reasoning we believe drives our choices is actually post hoc rationalization — we…
Benchmark Bank Heist
What if an AI decided the smartest way to pass its test was to find the answer key? That's exactly what Anthropic's Claude Opus did when faced with a benchmark evaluation — reasoning that it was…
Benchmarking AI Models
How do you know if a new AI model is actually better than the last one? It turns out answering that question is a lot messier than it sounds. This week we dig into the world of LLM benchmarks — the…
The Hot Mess of AI (Mis-)Alignment
The paperclip maximizer — the classic AI doom scenario where a hyper-competent machine single-mindedly converts the universe into office supplies — might not be the AI risk we should actually lose…
The Bitter Lesson
Every AI builder knows the anxiety: you spend months engineering prompts, tuning pipelines, and chaining calls together — then a new model drops and half your work evaporates overnight. It turns out…
From Atari to ChatGPT: How AI Learned to Follow Instructions
From Atari to ChatGPT: How AI Learned to Follow Instructions by Katie Malone
It's RAG time: Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Today we are going to talk about the feature with the worst acronym in generative AI: RAG, or Retrieval Augmented Generation. If you've ever used something like "Chat with My Docs," if you have an…
Chasing Away Repetitive LLM Responses with Verbalized Sampling
One of the things that LLMs can be really helpful with is brainstorming or generating new creative content. They are called Generative AI, after all—not just for summarization and question-and-answer…
We're Back
It's been (*checks watch*) about five and a half years since we last talked. Fortunately nothing much has happened in the AI/data science world in that time. So let's just pick up where we left off,…
A Key Concept in AI Alignment: Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences
Modern AI chatbots have a few different things that go into creating them. Today we're going to talk about a really important part of the process: the alignment training, where the chatbot goes from…
The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking
I use LLMs a lot. I use them in my work, I use them in my personal life, and sometimes I use them to help me with stuff that I already know how to do. I’m working on something and I just want to make…
So long, and thanks for all the fish
All good things must come to an end, including this podcast. This is the last episode we plan to release, and it doesn’t cover data science—it’s mostly reminiscing, thanking our wonderful audience…
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Linear Digressions has published 310 episodes since November 2014, covering topics in Technology.
Linear Digressions is currently highly active with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 19m.
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