Welcome to M5BMachine 5-Minute Briefing

It is that time of the year again when work begins to slow down and the weather turns pleasant. Families and friends start coming together to celebrate the festive season and welcome the new year. As you prepare for Christmas and New Year celebrations, you can now create personalized greeting cards ...

Comparing metrics across datasets and models The post How to Do Evals on a Bloated RAG Pipeline appeared first on Towards Data Science.

ESG reporting or Environmental, Social, and Governance reporting, often feels overwhelming because the data comes from so many places and takes ages to pull together. Teams spend most of their time collecting numbers instead of interpreting what they mean. Agentic AI changes that dynamic. Instead of...

What do regular technology users think (and know) about AI? The post Understanding the Generative AI User appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Understanding ensemble learning from first principles in Excel The post The Machine Learning “Advent Calendar” Day 19: Bagging in Excel appeared first on Towards Data Science....

The AI wars reached their highest point in late 2025. Google released Gemini 3 Pro on November 18, and in no time, it had 2 billion users. OpenAI then took the plunge, issuing GPT 5.2 on December 9, having previously planned it to take a while longer but now quickening their pace because of the […] ...

With so much going on in tech nowadays, it might be hard for one to figure out where to begin. With learners having different preferences and requirements, catering to all of them might be a tall order. But this article is here to bridge that gap.  This article will list 10 YouTube channels for 10 [...

From a weekend chore to a fun application of valuable operations research principles The post How I Optimized My Leaf Raking Strategy Using Linear Programming appeared first on Towards Data Science....

Spending too much time on repetitive tasks? These Python scripts will help you automate the mundane stuff that drains your productivity.

Understanding forward propagation and backpropagation through explicit formulas The post The Machine Learning “Advent Calendar” Day 18: Neural Network Classifier in Excel appeared first on Towards Data Science....

An optimal solution to the well-known NP-complete problem, when the input values are close enough to each other. The post The Subset Sum Problem Solved in Linear Time for Dense Enough Inputs appeared first on Towards Data Science....

There is a popular notion, which I personally don’t believe in – “Intelligent is Slow.” Everything associated with high speed is somehow held in a negative light, just for being, well, fast. What they tend to forget is – In today’s fast-paced world, speed might just be your only ticket to success. T...

With ChatGPT’s latest model taking the world by storm, you might be wondering about the old guard: Nano Banana Pro. Giving the taste of professional grade image generation and editing to all users, Nano Banana is THE tool people reach out to, for AI-image generation.  But does this still hold true? ...

Using Python to generate art The post Generating Artwork in Python Inspired by Hirst’s Million-Dollar Spots Painting appeared first on Towards Data Science....

When indexing hurts more than it helps: how we realized our RAG use case needed a key-value store, not a vector database The post When (Not) to Use Vector DB appeared first on Towards Data Science....

Every few months, the AI world reshuffles its deck, and as we stand at the end of 2025, we already have a brand-new leaderboard. Models are getting sharper, faster, and strangely more “human,” making it harder for developers to ignore how much these systems now shape modern web experiences. So inste...

With the rapid advances in the domain of AI, it might be harrowing for some to go through the pages-and-pages of research documents and release notes, outlining the developments. Reading might not be the cup of tea for some. In the increasingly visual environment, some of you’d like to learn Artific...

Softmax Regression is simply Logistic Regression extended to multiple classes. By computing one linear score per class and normalizing them with Softmax, we obtain multiclass probabilities without changing the core logic. The loss, the gradients, and the optimization remain the same. Only the number...

In the Author Spotlight series, TDS Editors chat with members of our community about their career path in data science and AI, their writing, and their sources of inspiration. Today, we’re thrilled to share our conversation with Maria Mouschoutzi.  Maria is a Data Analyst and Project Manager with a ...

Learn how to become a more efficient programmer with local testing The post How to Increase Coding Iteration Speed appeared first on Towards Data Science....

This one little trick can bring about enhanced training stability, the use of larger learning rates and improved scaling properties The post NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper Review: Qwen’s Systematic Exploration of Attention Gating appeared first on Towards Data Science....

In this article, we rebuild Logistic Regression step by step directly in Excel. Starting from a binary dataset, we explore why linear regression struggles as a classifier, how the logistic function fixes these issues, and how log-loss naturally appears from the likelihood. With a transparent gradien...

Most breakthroughs in deep learning — from simple neural networks to large language models — are built upon a principle that is much older than AI itself: decentralization. Instead of relying on a powerful “central planner” coordinating and commanding the behaviors of other components, modern deep-l...

Deep learning models are based on activation functions that provide non-linearity and enable networks to learn complicated patterns. This article will discuss the Softplus activation function, what it is, and how it can be used in PyTorch. Softplus can be said to be a smooth form of the popular ReLU...