Yacine Mahdid
@yacinelearning • 29,510 subscribers
(neuro/ai) I make technical deep learning tutorials 👺
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accurate representation of the best researchers I know going about their day
Yacine Mahdid378,290 views • 9 months ago
I had a fantastic time discussing with the learning legend Justin Skycak from Math Academy about learning math in the modern age. we've talked about his quite impressive self-learning journey (3000h of math in high school) all the way to how he hand curated the initial knowledge graph for math academy to make that process more efficient. great lively 3h discussion here are the chapters: 0:00:00 - intro: 0:02:10 - justin background 0:05:45 - 3000h math self study in high school 0:11:45 - what a day looked like for that 3000h stretch 0:16:10 - meta-learning vs pure math learning 0:21:50 - when did you get into cognitive neuro? 0:29:55 - how did the fundamental math helped in your research projects 0:43:10 - what does the math academy learning system looks like 0:47:34 - how did you guys build the 2000 topic knowledge graph 1:01:15 - would LLM be useful as an interface to that knowledge graph for the students? 1:10:46 - how does the FIRe spaced repetition algorithm works? 1:17:34 - does the same knowledge graph structure would work for physics? or other topic?: 1:34:05 - how do you understand the subject vs the curiculum 1:35:50 - is there a connection between studying math and learning a sport? 1:42:00 - do you think in math doing and teaching requires different skills? 1:56:25 - could you get understanding without automaticy? 2:05:35 - do you see any upside of confusion in learning? 2:14:11 - learning math as an adult? 2:19:20 - how to fill the motivation gap after learning the fundamental? 2:24:10 - how should teaching math for kids and adults balance fundamentals and creativity? 2:33:55 - is it ever too late to learn math seriously? 2:46:00 - mastery learning vs ultra learning 2:51:30 - top-down vs bottom-up 2:53:40 - mastery learning for domain without a structured hierarchical structure? 2:56:30 - neurodivergence / adhd for structured math learning? 3:06:20 - amateur mathematician augmented with technology will be able to contribute to research? 3:14:37 - what are you most excited about right now in term of learning enjoy!
Yacine Mahdid57,320 views • 4 months ago
one thing that has saved my projects more time than I can count is evals boy was I excited when florian, quite literally an expert in benchmarks, agreed to hop into a ~2h interview to do a walkthrough of what the eval landscape looks like in 2026 (and also answer my personal business questions on the subject) given that now running frontier model through benchmarks is a vector for hacking other systems in order to avoid doing work (looking at you sol), I think it's more important than ever to educate folks on the evals situation. had a lot of fun throughout this session and I hope that you learn a thing or two! enjoy! 🌹 table of content: 0:00:00: are AI Benchmark broken? 0:05:45: Florian Brand background 0:09:00: what motivates florian to work on evaluation? 0:13:33: what is the mirrorcode benchmark about? 0:18:20: cheating in agent benchmark is insaneeeee 0:24:08: LLM benchmarks in era of agents 0:26:30: what’s up with the pelican man 0:28:27: evals are about capabilities 0:31:46: components of running evals 0:35:30: the volume of things to audit is huge!!! 0:40:20: expert answers are wrong hahahaha 0:46:00: api providers aren’t the same 0:48:00: benchmark narrow capabilities (synthetically) 0:50:56: link between eval and environment 0:53:45: small validated benchmark or massive bench? 0:56:11: what is your flow to review a benchmark? 0:58:30: tracking work capabilities with evaluation 1:00:20: slide deck in industry is all vibecoded 1:03:30: harness impact in the evaluation 1:07:39: hardware/sandboxes impact evaluation too! 1:11:00: “is it going to get worse?” 1:12:40: all components influence the final score 1:13:50: training models on different harnesses? 1:17:20: is the model just the weights or it’s all of it? 1:19:30: how to craft benchmark that prevent to cheating and undereliciting models in 2026 1:23:19: ways agents cheat and steal 1:26:00: correct elicitation of capabilities is important 1:36:00: building evaluation on prime intellect 1:45:10: how do you design interactivity benchmarks? 1:48:40: do you think evals are well set to reflect real world performance? 1:52:50: what will the benchmarking landscape will look like in 1 year
Yacine Mahdid12,923 views • 1 month ago
auto-research is starting to gain traction as a very viable paradigm for creating useful research discovery. now, that paradigm is still in its infancy and the infrastructure to hold all that trail of context as the agents blaze through experiments isn't well defined (to say the least). on that topic, I had the chance to chat with my boys francesco and giulio from paradigma about what underlying infra is needed to make this paradigm work. the paradigma's paradigm, which involves copious amount of DAGs, make this auto-research paradigm a paradigmatic case of essential infrastructure. here's the full video in full: - 0:00 - what is missing from auto-research? - 2:02 - giulio and francesco ai journey - 8:10 - research infra is the bottleneck? - 10:18 - paradigma vision of autonomous research - 13:17 - “important discovery per joules” - 17:15 - why is DAG the unit of research for auto-research? - 20:40 - is paradigma trying to replace the research publication? - 24:50 - how does knowledge is shared between experiments in the DAG? - 27:34 - what is even auto-research lol? - 33:53 - the value of the human mind in this auto-research future. - 37:00 - how do you reconcile hallucination in this auto-research paradigm? - 41:33 - the adoption of auto-research across varied fields? - 47:30 - ✨ introduction to the auto-research infrastructure. ✨ - 56:55 - where is the code? - 59:10 - full IDE next? - 1:03:20 - the place of the human in this DAG / code quality? manual node? token spent? - 1:16:02 - who’s the user for auto-research? - 1:18:13 - how to validate bad DAG? - 1:20:18 - ✨ auto-research agent results ✨ - 1:22:53 - ✨ how a big research DAG looks like? ✨ - 1:25:10 - how to get the canonical DAG for the final result? - 1:27:50 - the auto-research DAG being the new pre-print? - 1:30:05 - what’s next for paradigma and the auto-research infra? - 1:35:00 - what are they excited about research wise? enjoyyyyy my guys 🌹
Yacine Mahdid12,091 views • 3 months ago
I had an awesome time interviewing idan shenfeld and Jonas Hübotter from MIT and ETH Zurich about self-distillation. this very promising post-training paradigm where the model acts as its own teacher by conditioning on environment feedback or demonstrations. we cover the SDPO algo for reinforcement learning with rich feedback and SDFT for continual learning without forgetting along with many applications. we dig into how it works, why it's simpler and faster than GRPO, and where this is already showing up in production systems. table of content: 0:00 - what is self distillation 2:50 - idan (MIT) and jonas (ETH Zurich) introduction and motivation 18:40 - different perspective of on-policy self-distillation (presentation) 36:00 - metacognition and specificity in self-distillation 37:24 - very long hard task and self-distillation 42:00 - continual learning with self-distillation (presentation) 1:16:50 - what is next in this research direction? 1:20:00 - is there any experience with subjective feedbacks? 1:22:50 - quality vs number of feedbacks? 1:26:40 - what setting would self-distillation struggle vs GRPO? the slides were super crisp really cool of them to share! enjoy my guys 🌹
Yacine Mahdid13,066 views • 4 months ago
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