Labs · 25 doors · 25 pieces

The AI-dvent Calendar

Twenty-five pieces from this site, each behind a door on a graphics card. Open them in any order; the board powers up as you go.

All 25 pieces

The same pieces as plain links, in day order.

Day 1: Transformer AtlasInteractive Explainer
Two GPT-2 small attention heads share a pattern but have opposite causal effects. Zero-ablate one and measure.
Day 2: Scaling LawsInteractive Explainer
Kaplan's 2020 finding: loss falls on nearly straight log-log lines as model size, data or compute grow.
Day 3: The Physics OriginThe Anthropic Book · N°01
In 2000, seventeen-year-old Dario Amodei was cut from the US Physics Olympiad team. The book starts there.
Day 4: Jared KaplanFounderFiles · N°006
A holographic-gravity physicist ran dimensional analysis on the loss landscape, co-wrote the scaling laws, and co-founded Anthropic.
Day 5: Constitutional ClassifiersInteractive Explainer
Anthropic's jailbreak defense moved into the generation stream and got about 40× cheaper by watching the whole exchange.
Day 6: The Ghost in the MachineOral History · GPT-3
Fourteen voices from inside OpenAI recount how the GPT-3 paper broke AI orthodoxy and started the scaling era.
Day 7: The Geometry TradeDispatch · N°008
A December 2025 paper says networks collapse into the same low-rank geometry. Chip design becomes cartography.
Day 8: Universal Weight SubspaceResearch Build
Filter training data by whether each example's gradient points into the shared weight subspace, negative finding included.
Day 9: Chris OlahFounderFiles · N°002
Olah got hired on a blog, mapped circuits and features, and now asks what we owe the systems.
Day 10: The Frame and the FilingResearch · Who Moves Markets
Podcasters and newsletter writers shape how Anthropic is read; launches, scoops and filings are what move the price.
Day 11: The Whisperer and the StackDispatch · N°009
OpenAI hired a Hollywood whisperer; Anthropic built a stack. One bets on dinners, one skips the licensing room.
Day 12: Claude ShannonFounderFiles · N°068
A classified 1945 memo held the first statistical model of English. Frontier models still play Shannon's guessing game.
Day 13: Kinematic SpaceInteractive Explainer
A 2015 Stanford paper argues MERA tensor networks discretize kinematic space, where each geodesic becomes a single point.
Day 14: Thought MoleculesLabs · Tool
Local-first RAG over your Drive research docs that returns only verbatim, substring-verified passages, ready to paste back.
Day 15: Juan MaldacenaFounderFiles · N°009
His 1997 paper put a region's whole interior on its boundary. It's high-energy physics' most-cited paper.
Day 16: Concrete Problems in AI SafetyInteractive Explainer
Break the pipeline behind an office-cleaning robot and find five failures, from reward hacking to distributional shift.
Day 17: Chinchilla ScalingInteractive Explainer
Split a fixed compute budget between parameters and tokens, and see why 70B beat 280B.
Day 18: Ilya SutskeverFounderFiles · N°005
He scaled the transformer until scaling broke, then left OpenAI to build Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Day 19: The Scaffolding Is the ProductDispatch · N°006
Same GPT-5, three scaffolds, a 2.7× gap. Stanford's ARTEMIS beat nine of ten human pentesters at $18.21/hr.
Day 20: Persona VectorsStudy
Sycophancy, hallucination and malice are linear directions in activation space: measurable, controllable, partly preventable.
Day 21: MathematicaFeature · The Eames Exhibit
IBM asked the Eameses to explain mathematics. They built a machine room where it performs itself.
Day 22: Demis HassabisFounderFiles · N°037
Chess prodigy, game designer, neuroscientist: Hassabis turned game systems and brain science into DeepMind's agent architectures.
Day 23: Tech Tarot CardsLabs · Deck
A tarot deck for builders: founders, context windows and scaling laws as archetypes. Pattern recognition, not mysticism.
Day 24: Dario AmodeiFounderFiles · N°024
One move, repeated: make an opaque system legible before you trust it. Retina, scaling laws, Constitutional AI, Anthropic.
Day 25: The Anthropic BookThe Anthropic Book
A primary-source-anchored book on Anthropic's first five years, chapter by chapter, with PDF, EPUB and audio.