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Every episode, from the beginning.

AI History

+4

Attention Wasn't the Original Name

Aug 31, 2026

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2 min read

Attention Wasn't the Original Name

In the summer of 2014, a graduate student in Montreal built a fix for a stubborn bug in a translation model, one that would outlive the paper it was written for. He didn't call it attention. For a while, neither did his supervisor.

Plain Machine
Plain Machine

AI History

+4

The Idea Word2Vec Didn't Invent

Aug 24, 2026

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2 min read

The Idea Word2Vec Didn't Invent

In 1957, a linguist wrote the sentence that word embeddings would spend the next fifty-six years trying to compute. The breakthrough wasn't a new idea. It was making an old one fast enough to run.

Plain Machine
Plain Machine

AI History

+4

The Year Deep Learning Won Twice

Aug 17, 2026

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2 min read

The Year Deep Learning Won Twice

Before AlexNet made headlines in 2012, two graduate students in Toronto had already proven the same idea worked — on something harder than pictures: sound.

Plain Machine
Plain Machine

AI History

+4

The Chip Nobody Built for This

Aug 10, 2026

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2 min read

The Chip Nobody Built for This

For six years, the hardware that would train modern AI sat inside millions of gaming PCs. Nobody in AI research had a reason to go looking for it.

Plain Machine
Plain Machine

AI History

+4

The Bet Nobody Thought Would Pay Off

Aug 3, 2026

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2 min read

The Bet Nobody Thought Would Pay Off

Before it changed AI forever, ImageNet was the idea Fei-Fei Li's own colleagues told her to drop.

Plain Machine
Plain Machine

AI History

+4

The Algorithm That Waited a Decade to Be Believed

Jul 27, 2026

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2 min read

The Algorithm That Waited a Decade to Be Believed

Before Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams got the credit in 1986, a lonely doctoral thesis had already cracked backpropagation — and almost no one noticed.

Plain Machine
Plain Machine

AI History

+4

The Feud That Started in High School

Jul 20, 2026

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2 min read

The Feud That Started in High School

Frank Rosenblatt and Marvin Minsky shared a classroom before they shared the argument that froze neural network research for a generation.

Plain Machine
Plain Machine

AI History

+4

The Fight That Broke a Lab

Jul 13, 2026

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2 min read

The Fight That Broke a Lab

Months before Expert Systems ever hit a balance sheet, the hardware behind them was already fracturing — over a disagreement that had nothing to do with technology.

Plain Machine
Plain Machine

AI History

+4

The Machine That Was Better Than The Doctors

Jul 6, 2026

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2 min read

The Machine That Was Better Than The Doctors

MYCIN passed its test. Medicine still said no.

Plain Machine
Plain Machine
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Plain Machine

AI explained in plain English, for people who build real things. No hype. Just the mechanics that matter.

© 2026 Plain Machine.
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