John Pavlus

Portland, United States

Writer and Filmmaker at Freelance

writer & filmmaker ※ @smithsonian @bw @natgeo @npr Best 🇺🇸 Sci & Nat Writing series, &c. ℹ️ https://t.co/IdtqZL1zSY 🎬 https://t.co/kpCCWRiYSV My newsletter ⤵️

Articles

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History

2 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | John Pavlus

I. The Wars of The Roses (2020–22) “understanding wars”• GPT-3• “a field in crisis”As transformer models approached (and surpassed) “human baselines” on various NLP benchmarks, arguments were already brewing about how to interpret their capabilities. In 2020, those arguments — especially about “meaning” and “understanding” — came to a head in a paper imagining an LLM as an octopus. EMILY M.
What the Most Essential Terms in AI Really Mean

2 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | John Pavlus

Artificial intelligence moves fast, so the first step in understanding it — and its role in science — is to know the lingo. From basic concepts like “neural networks” and “pretraining” to more contested terms like “hallucinations” and “reasoning,” here are 19 key ideas from the world of modern AI. Starting with …Artificial Intelligence / “The science and engineering of making intelligent machines,” according to John McCarthy, who coined the phrase in 1955.
How public key cryptography really works, using only simple math

1 month ago | livescience.com | John Pavlus

For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You'd scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended audience. This rule acted like the key to a lock. If you had the key, you could unscramble the message; otherwise, you'd need to pick the lock. Some locks are so effective they can never be picked, even with infinite time and resources.
How public key cryptography really works, using only simple math

1 month ago | flipboard.com | John Pavlus

NowWant to raise bilingual kids? First, let go of a common mythWhen journalist Conz Preti brought her three children to visit family in Argentina in 2022, her four-year-old son did something surprising. "He just started fluently speaking in Spanish with my family, with no hesitation, no mistakes," Preti says.
The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI

2 months ago | quantamagazine.org | John Pavlus

Physics dazzled Miles Cranmer from an early age. His grandfather, a physics professor at the University of Toronto, gave him books on the subject, and his parents took him to open houses at universities near their home in southern Ontario, Canada. The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics was a favorite. “I remember someone talking about infinity when I was super young, and it was so cool to me,” Cranmer said.
The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI

2 months ago | flipboard.com | John Pavlus

5 hours agoBuild a Stunning Website in Just 10 Minutes with AI (No Code)Creating a professional website has become faster and more accessible than ever. With the rise of AI-powered website builders, you can design, …4 hours agoThis education startup is using AI to help students learn. It says tech should never replace human teachersEugene Kashuk started Brighterly to help American students who are falling behind in math because existing solutions aren’t working.
The Simple Math Behind Public Key Cryptography

Dec 14, 2024 | technewstube.com | John Pavlus

The security system that underlies the internet makes use of a curious fact: You can broadcast part of your encryption to make your information much more secure.
The Simple Math Behind Public Key Cryptography

Dec 14, 2024 | wired.com | John Pavlus

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended audience. This rule acted like the key to a lock. If you had the key, you could unscramble the message; otherwise, you’d need to pick the lock. Some locks are so effective they can never be picked, even with infinite time and resources.
Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold

Dec 9, 2024 | quantamagazine.org | Ben Brubaker |Susan D'Agostino |Max G. Levy |John Pavlus

Introduction How do you construct a perfect machine out of imperfect parts? That’s the central challenge for researchers building quantum computers. The trouble is that their elementary building blocks, called qubits, are exceedingly sensitive to disturbance from the outside world. Today’s prototype quantum computers are too error-prone to do anything useful. In the 1990s, researchers worked out the theoretical foundations for a way to overcome these errors, called quantum error correction.
What Is Distributed Computing?

Nov 25, 2024 | quantamagazine.org | Max G. Levy |John Pavlus |Stephen Ornes |Ben Brubaker

Introduction No device is an island: Your daily computational needs depend on more than just the microprocessors inside your computer or phone. Our modern world relies on “distributed computing,” which shares the computational load among multiple different machines. The technique passes data back and forth in an elaborate choreography of digital bits — a dance that has shaped the internet’s past, present and likely future.