Welcome to M5BMachine 5-Minute Briefing

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...

Introduction How do we identify latent groups of patients in a large cohort? How can we find similarities among patients that go beyond the well-known comorbidity clusters associated with specific diseases? And more importantly, how can we extract quantitative signals that can be analyzed, compared,...

Linear Regression looks simple, but it introduces the core ideas of modern machine learning: loss functions, optimization, gradients, scaling, and interpretation. In this article, we rebuild Linear Regression in Excel, compare the closed-form solution with Gradient Descent, and see how the coefficie...

OpenAI models have evolved drastically over the past few years. The journey began with GPT-3.5 and has now reached GPT-5.1 and the newer o-series reasoning models. While ChatGPT uses GPT-5.1 as its primary model, the API gives you access to many more options that are designed for different kinds of ...

Mistral AI’s latest announcement introduces DevStral 2 (123B parameters), DevStral Small 2 (24B), and the Mistral Vibe CLI, a terminal-native coding assistant built for agentic coding tasks. Both models are fully open source and tuned for production workflows, while the new Vibe CLI brings project-a...

The majority of people build machine learning models in an experimental or research setting, which is appropriate for exploration. It is not until you start to deploy it within real applications that you’ll see the actual value, for instance, a web application requesting predictions from your model,...