causal models

A four-minute minutephysics video arguing that causal models and causal networks let statistics infer causation from correlation. It touches on Reichenbach's principle, common causes, feedback and quantum causal discovery.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile how language models generate plausible text and how transformers improved on recurrent networks, with a look at what comes next.

PBS Space Time explains how spacetime geometry and light cones determine the order of events and what can cause what. It visualizes causality in special relativity.

A short cartoon explaining how language models like ChatGPT work, from autocomplete and conditional probabilities to neural networks, gradient descent and backpropagation. It shows how networks act as universal function approximators.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains climate sensitivity and why recent observations suggest climate models may have underestimated warming. She says this changed her view on how worried to be.

Rob Miles discusses GPT-3 on Computerphile, covering how scaling parameters kept improving results over GPT-2 and how the model nearly learned arithmetic without anyone knowing exactly how.

3Blue1Brown's visual explanation of how transformers and GPT-style language models work, tracing data through tokens, embeddings and attention.

PBS Space Time argues that the speed of light is better understood as the speed of causality, the universal limit on how fast cause and effect propagate. Light travels at that speed because it is massless, but the limit itself is a property of spacetime.

PBS Space Time explains the quantum eraser experiment, in which erasing which-path information appears to reverse causality in a double-slit setup. It discusses what this means for quantum mechanics.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains the delayed choice quantum eraser and argues it does not rewrite the past, as popular accounts claim. She walks through what the experiment actually shows.

A Technology Connections video essay on how analog and digital clocks shape different mental models of time, with the minute hand acting as a progress indicator.

A PBS Space Time episode hosted by Gabe Perez-Giz on the nature of spacetime and whether space and time are fundamental. It builds up reference frames and causality in a short, dense format.

A guest video by Welch Labs on 3Blue1Brown explaining how text-to-image and video models work. It covers CLIP, shared embedding spaces, diffusion models (DDPM, DDIM), conditioning, guidance and negative prompts.

Huygens Optics explores the idea that space is a non-linear elastic medium, and uses simulations to show how wave energy might be confined locally into particle-like objects. It touches on inertia, the Schwinger limit and the vacuum as a medium.

Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.

Computerphile video in which Mike Pound explains a University of Maryland paper on watermarking LLM output. The method biases token choices so generated text can later be detected statistically.

3Blue1Brown builds toy SIR models to simulate how an epidemic spreads and tests scenarios like social distancing, travel restrictions, central gathering places and quarantine. It was made during the early COVID-19 outbreak.

A 1936 Chevrolet-sponsored film that explains how a car transmission works by treating gears as spinning levers. It uses physical models to make the mechanism clear.

A Welch Labs explainer on neural scaling laws and the compute-efficient frontier, asking why model loss seems to hit a line it cannot cross. It draws an analogy to an ideal gas law for AI.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining why faster-than-light travel is equivalent to travelling back in time, using relativity and Minkowski diagrams for different observers.

A five-minute animated explainer of liquid democracy, in which voters can delegate their vote to trusted people. It starts from the origins of democracy and contrasts direct and representative models.

A short explainer from Nat and Friends on where Google Earth's 3D imagery comes from, how it is stitched together, and how often it is updated. It describes aircraft carrying camera rigs and photogrammetry that turns the photos into 3D models.

PBS Space Time examines Roger Penrose's idea that consciousness arises from quantum processes in the brain, and reviews new evidence about microtubules. It ends with an estimate of what replicating consciousness would demand.

A PBS Space Time episode on fuzzballs, the string-theory proposal for black holes that replaces the singularity with a tangle of strings. It explains why black holes seem to both have to exist and break known physics.

A Veritasium video on how a feud between Russian mathematicians led to Markov chains and the modern prediction algorithms built on them. It covers the history and the math behind them.