AI and machine learning
17 papers · 1958–2026 · oldest first
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Almost everything in modern AI is one idea repeated: a very large number of numbers, adjusted over and over until a program does something useful. The papers here are, in order, about how you adjust them at all, what happens when you stack more of them, what is really inside one when you are done, what might go wrong if they keep improving, and what they still cannot do. None of them is about chatbots. Read in date order they are a conversation, each one answering something the one before it left open.
Ours, not the authors' — written for a reader who does not work in this field. The papers' own words are the quotes on each paper's page.
The shape of the field
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1958
The perceptron: a probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain
Frank Rosenblatt · in the archive · 1 korrent
To understand organisms' recognition, generalization, recall and thinking we need how they sense, store and use information; the perceptron is a probabilistic model for brain storage and organization.
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1986
Learning representations by back-propagating errors
Rumelhart, Hinton & Williams
How to push the error back through many layers so every layer can learn, not just the last one. Everything below runs on this.
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1997
Jürgen Schmidhuber, Sepp Hochreiter · in the archive · 2 korrents
Networks that process sequences lose the teaching signal over long delays; LSTM keeps that signal constant inside special memory units with gates, learning across more than 1000 steps.
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1998
Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition (with 3 co-authors)
Yoshua Bengio · in the archive · 4 korrents
Neural nets built for how 2D shapes vary beat every other method at reading handwritten digits, and whole multi-part document readers can be trained end to end the same way.
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2009
ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database (with 5 co-authors)
Fei-Fei Li · in the archive · 4 korrents
A new image database organizes 3.2 million clean pictures under thousands of word categories from a big dictionary of meanings, far larger and more accurate than earlier image sets.
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2012
ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks (AlexNet)
Krizhevsky, Sutskever & Hinton
A deep network on graphics cards wins the image contest by a wide margin, and the field changes direction almost overnight.
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2014
Generative Adversarial Networks (with 7 co-authors)
Yoshua Bengio · in the archive · 2 korrents
Two networks play a game where one creates fake samples to fool the other into thinking they are real data, until the creator matches the true data distribution.
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2014
Kingma & Ba, "Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization" (arXiv)
Diederik P. Kingma, Jimmy Ba · in the archive · 4 korrents
A new algorithm called Adam finds good solutions to huge noisy problems by tracking running averages of gradients and their sizes so steps adjust themselves with almost no tuning.
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2015
He, Zhang, Ren & Sun, "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition" (arXiv)
Jian Sun, Kaiming He · in the archive · 4 korrents
Making neural nets much deeper for image recognition works better if layers learn only the difference from their inputs instead of full new mappings, letting accuracy rise with depth.
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2017
Aidan N. Gomez, Ashish Vaswani, Illia Polosukhin, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Niki Parmar, Noam Shazeer, Łukasz Kaiser · in the archive · 3 korrents
A new network for translating languages uses only attention to link words, dropping the usual step-by-step loops and filters entirely, and it works better while training faster.
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2018
Frankle & Carbin, "The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks" (arXiv)
Jonathan Frankle, Michael Carbin · in the archive · 5 korrents
Big networks started at random hide smaller ones inside that, kept at those starting weights, train alone to the same accuracy just as fast.
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2018
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Jacob Devlin, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, Ming-Wei Chang · in the archive · 4 korrents
Train a language model to guess randomly hidden words using the full surrounding text so it sees both directions, then lightly adjust it for many different tasks.
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2019
On the Measure of Intelligence
François Chollet · in the archive · 5 korrents
Being smart is not scoring high on a fixed task after lots of built-in knowledge or training; it is how efficiently you acquire skills on new problems.
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2020
Language models are few-shot learners (with 30 co-authors)
Dario Amodei · in the archive · 3 korrents
Larger language models can do new tasks after seeing just a few examples in plain text, with no extra training, sometimes matching systems that got thousands of examples.
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2021
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold (with 33 co-authors)
Demis Hassabis · in the archive · 4 korrents
A computer program regularly predicts a protein's three-dimensional shape from its amino acid sequence alone at accuracy matching lab experiments, even with no similar structure known.
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2022
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (with 19 co-authors)
Jan Leike · in the archive · 4 korrents
Teaching language models via human good-answer examples and output rankings makes a small one preferred to a 100x larger plain model, with less lying and toxicity.
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2023
Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress (with 24 co-authors)
Yoshua Bengio · in the archive · 4 korrents
AI races toward goal-chasing systems that act alone, risking massive harms and irreversible loss of human control, while safety work and governance lag far behind.
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2025
Assessing Adaptive World Models in Machines with Novel Games (with 13 co-authors)
François Chollet · in the archive · 5 korrents
People adapt fast by quickly building mental models of how new places work, yet AI checks only look at fixed knowledge from big training sets.
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2026
Terence Tao · in the archive · 4 korrents
AI systems that check math proofs with computers are great at fixed problems but still cannot discover new theorems or settle open questions the way research mathematicians do.
17 of these 19 papers are in this archive, with quotes you can check — those are the linked ones. The rest are here so the timeline is the field's shape rather than ours: they carry no quote, no link and no claim beyond their title, authors and year, and the one-line notes are ours, about what each paper did rather than what anyone believes.