Inside the Black Box: Cracking AI & Deep Learning
Arshavir Blackwell, PhD\ud83e\udd16, John Holman, Silvia StepitovaI open AI models — and make them write in my voice. I've been building them for 30+ years. Get experiments run on my own hardware, what's going on inside these systems, and how to tune a model to sound like you, not like AI. P.S. No hype, no speculation.
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arshavirblackwell.substack.comLatest Issues
Three Ways to Be Wrong About the Past Tense
Across four posts I argued that language models don’t learn the past tense the way children do — that they slap -ed on everything first and memorize exceptions like went afterwards, the reverse of a child’s order, and that a child-like U-sh...
Not at This Address
For a long time, the standard explanation of language in the brain was a box.
Somewhere in there, the story went, was a part that did grammar. Not a metaphor — a place. If that part was damaged, grammar broke. That was the explanation for...
My Advisors Argued This for Thirty Years. Now You Can Check
The only thing you people have in common
At a conference once, a researcher said of a certain group of authors: “The only thing you people seem to have in common is you hate Chomsky.”
The book those authors wrote was called Rethinking...
Inside the Past Tense: Raw Letters, Raw Sound
Can a model learn past tense the way children seem to, if you remove the tokenizer from the equation? This final installment tests raw letters and raw sound, probes whether a U-shaped pattern can be forced, and shows why the answer points t...
The Past Tense: 40 Years Later, We Can Look Inside
Corrected 13 September 2026: two numbers in this post have changed. See the note at the end.
tl;DR. Every result in this series was open to one objection: modern models are handed -ed as a ready-made token before training starts, so maybe...
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Authors
The writers behind this newsletter.
I show industry and academic experts what's actually inside AI models, and how to tune them to write in your own voice. I've been building them for 30+ years.
Awakened-Intelligence.com | AiValuations.org | AI systems architect & MI researcher. Research infrastructure, closed agentic pipelines, model agnostic harnesses, LLM continuity containers. EVERY article Cowritten with my persistent Ai's.
AI regulatory lawyer writing AI Law. Decoded. Translating complex AI regulation into plain English. EU AI Act compliance explained practically.
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