The Gradient: Perspectives on AI

Some Changes at The Gradient

Nov 21, 2024

34:25

Snipd AI

The hosts reflect on their journey, discussing the evolution of the platform and changes ahead. They highlight the importance of community engagement and express gratitude to their followers. Key AI articles, particularly those on AI art and story generation, are revisited. A new dataset for evaluating AI benchmarks is introduced, along with innovative evaluation projects. The team acknowledges past contributions and encourages listeners to stay connected and engaged in this ongoing adventure.

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Quick takeaways

The Gradient is transitioning to prioritize full-length drafts over unwritten article pitches due to time constraints faced by the team.

The podcast aims to explore a broader range of topics in AI, reflecting a commitment to quality content amidst evolving formats.

Deep dives

Evolution and History of the Gradient

The Gradient was founded in 2018 by a group of Stanford students who sought to create a platform for sharing high-quality machine learning content. Initially inspired by the success of blogging in the machine learning community, the founders aimed to collect and edit notable articles from lesser-known authors. Over the years, the platform expanded to include a newsletter and podcast, evolving into a hub for disseminating cutting-edge ideas in AI. Throughout its existence, it has played a crucial role in amplifying voices and fostering discussion within the machine learning field.

Intro

3min

Navigating Change: The Gradient's Journey

20min

Exploring Influential AI Articles and Current Projects

6min

Advancements in AI Evaluation and Research Developments

3min

A Heartfelt Acknowledgment and Invitation to Engage

3min

Hi everyone!

If you’re a new subscriber or listener, welcome.

If you’re not new, you’ve probably noticed that things have slowed down from us a bit recently. Hugh Zhang, Andrey Kurenkov and I sat down to recap some of The Gradient’s history, where we are now, and how things will look going forward.

To summarize and give some context:

The Gradient has been around for around 6 years now – we began as an online magazine, and began producing our own newsletter and podcast about 4 years ago. With a team of volunteers — we take in a bit of money through Substack that we use for subscriptions to tools we need and try to pay ourselves a bit — we’ve been able to keep this going for quite some time.

Our team has less bandwidth than we’d like right now (and I’ll admit that at least some of us are running on fumes…) — we’ll be making a few changes:

* Magazine: We’re going to be scaling down our editing work on the magazine. While we won’t be accepting pitches for unwritten drafts for now, if you have a full piece that you’d like to pitch to us, we’ll consider posting it. If you’ve reached out about writing and haven’t heard from us, we’re really sorry. We’ve tried a few different arrangements to manage the pipeline of articles we have, but it’s been difficult to make it work. We still want this to be a place to promote good work and writing from the ML community, so we intend to continue using this Substack for that purpose. If we have more editing bandwidth on our team in the future, we want to continue doing that work.

* Newsletter: We’ll aim to continue the newsletter as before, but with a “Best from the Community” section highlighting posts. We’ll have a way for you to send articles you want to be featured, but for now you can reach us at our editor@thegradient.pub.

* Podcast: I’ll be continuing this (at a slower pace), but eventually transition it away from The Gradient given the expanded range. If you’re interested in following, it might be worth subscribing on another player like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or using the RSS feed.

* Sigmoid Social: We’ll keep this alive as long as there’s financial support for it.

If you like what we do and/or want to help us out in any way, do reach out to editor@thegradient.pub. We love hearing from you.

Timestamps

* (0:00) Intro

* (01:55) How The Gradient began

* (03:23) Changes and announcements

* (10:10) More Gradient history! On our involvement, favorite articles, and some plugs

Some of our favorite articles!

There are so many, so this is very much a non-exhaustive list:

* NLP’s ImageNet moment has arrived

* The State of Machine Learning Frameworks in 2019

* Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve