Field Notes on AI

AI has quietly become part of everyday life. We ask it to summarize emails, explain homework, generate images, and even help us write. Along the way, a whole new vocabulary came with it, words like LLM, token, context window, fine-tuning, and hallucination. If those words have ever made you feel like everyone else received a glossary except you, settle in. Most of them are simply labels for ideas that are much simpler than they sound, and today we are going to unpack them together, one cup of tea at a time. ...

🍃 What Can a Forest Teach Us About AI? “The best ideas don’t always begin inside a computer.” When most people think of artificial intelligence, they imagine robots, self-driving cars, or powerful computers processing enormous amounts of data. But what if one of the best places to understand AI wasn’t a laboratory at all? What if it was a forest? Not because trees can think, and not because forests are secretly intelligent. Rather, nature has spent millions of years solving problems that scientists and engineers are still trying to understand today. Sometimes, the most remarkable ideas in technology begin by observing the natural world. ...