the.com/inference
The quiet leap from what you see to what you swear must be true.
means A conclusion reached by reasoning from evidence or premises rather than from direct observation.
from From Latin inferre, 'to bring in' or 'carry forward' — built from in- ('into') plus ferre ('to carry,' a deep root that also gives us 'transfer' and 'fertile'). The medieval Latin noun inferentia carried the sense of one thing being 'brought in' as the logical result of another, and the word reached English by the late 16th century. So an inference is, quite literally, something you carry forward into your mind from what's already in front of you.
- Sherlock's trick
- He deduced; he actually inferred from clues
- Statistics core
- Entire field built on guessing populations from samples
- AI workload
- Running a trained model is called inference
- Mind reading
- Brains constantly infer others' intentions automatically
- Risky business
- Every inference can be confidently, beautifully wrong
alphago defeating lee sedol — deepmind's ai won 4-1 against world go champion in 2016 using neural networks and tree search
gpt-4 reasoning benchmark — openai's model scored 88th percentile on lsat and 90th on medical licensing exams in 2023
bayesian spam filtering — statistical inference technique that reduced email spam by ~95% starting in the early 2000s