A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “pattern recognition”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott Alexander shows how he won his 2022 bet about AI image generation capabilities, tracking the progress from early failures to complete success in 2025, using this to argue against AI skeptics.
Scott tests OpenAI's o3 model's ability to identify locations from photos, finding it has remarkable success even with minimal visual information, raising questions about AI capabilities.
Scott investigates the correlation between intelligence and neuron count, exploring various theories before suggesting that more neurons allow for less polysemantic (overlapping) representations of concepts.
Scott Alexander plays chess against GPT-2, an AI language model, and discusses the broader implications of AI's ability to perform diverse tasks without specific training.
Scott Alexander explores GPT-2's unexpected capabilities and argues that it demonstrates the potential for AI to develop abilities beyond its explicit programming, challenging skepticism about AGI.
Scott Alexander hypothesizes that mystical experiences, hallucinations, and paranoia might be linked to an overactive pattern-matching faculty in the brain.
Scott Alexander examines the process of 'crystallizing patterns' in thinking, discussing its benefits and potential pitfalls across various domains.