Research papers, investigations, explainers, videos, laws and the organizations doing the work, from people who are alarmed and people who are skeptical. New additions are checked by two people before they are listed. The launch collection was compiled with the help of AI research assistants, and every link was opened and checked on 22 September 2026.
4 works on “How does AI actually work?” · Research paper · clear filters
Argues models make things up partly because training and test scoring reward a confident guess over saying 'I don't know', and suggests scoring that penalises confident errors.
Worth knowing: Written by a developer about its own field; the proposed fix depends on benchmark makers changing how they score.
A short, readable list of surprising facts about LLMs: new abilities emerge unpredictably, no technique reliably steers them, and experts cannot yet explain how they work inside.
Worth knowing: Author is affiliated with New York University and Anthropic.
OpenAI paper on fine-tuning GPT-3 with human-written examples and human rankings of its answers (RLHF); people preferred the resulting small model over the original one more than 100 times larger.
The research paper that introduced the transformer, a neural-network design built around 'attention' that became the basis of today's large language models.