MSAILMichigan Student AI Lab
Reading groups, build-from-scratch projects, and a 37-talk archive, run by students at the University of Michigan since 2008.
The M is a live rectified flow, the core trick behind modern image generators. Three steps:
1. Start with static.
Every dot is dropped at random. Pure noise: no pattern, no M.
2. Give each dot an address.
The M is just a cloud of points. Each noise dot gets matched to one. Nearby dots get nearby addresses, so the paths don't tangle.
3. Walk straight there.
Slide t from 0 to 1 and every dot walks a straight line to its address. Noise becomes the M.
Image generators like Stable Diffusion 3 and Flux run exactly this recipe, with billions of dimensions instead of two and "a photo of a dog" instead of the M. Once the M settles, the gentle jiggling is Langevin dynamics: tiny random kicks that keep the dots distributed like the real thing instead of frozen in place.
We strive to spread our passion for AI throughout the University of Michigan student body, regardless of demographic or academic standing.
MSAIL was founded in 2008. During the semester we run reading groups and project teams; since 2020 the speaker series has hosted University of Michigan faculty, PhD researchers, and engineering teams from Bloomberg, ProQuest, and Datature.
Initiatives
All initiatives and the archiveTransformer Project
Replicate the GPT-2 transformer architecture and build it into a personal project.
CNN Project
Replicate a CNN architecture from scratch and build it into a personal project.
Education
Earn certifications from DeepLearning.AI in a drop-in format.
ML News
Paper and machine learning news discussion, from new models to applications to regulation, with optional presentations.
37 recorded talks, 2020 to 2024
- AlphaFold 2 and the Protein Folding Problem
- Concrete Problems in AI Safety
- Scaling Neural Tangent Kernels via Sketching and Random Features
- Faculty Talk: Cognitive Architecture
- The Trend Towards Large Language Models
- Fairness in Machine Learning
Find us
MSAIL is open to every University of Michigan student. These are our channels; Slack is the most active.