false positive

Definition

Plain language

A false alarm — flagging something as a problem when it actually isn't.

Also called: false positives, false-positive

Why it matters: Too many false alarms make a safety tool annoying and untrustworthy, so keeping them low is a key cost of any detector.

For example, a spam filter that moves an important work email to the junk folder has produced a false positive.

Heard on the show

“How many wrong answers are lying around, and how often the judge waves a wrong one through — call that second one the false-positive rate.”

Mentioned in 21 episodes

1. 207
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2. 202
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3. 201
   One in Four NeurIPS Papers Cites a Reference That Doesn't Exist
4. 181
   How to Backpropagate Blame Through a Team of Chatbots — And When It Backfires
5. 159
   Can a Coding Agent Run Its Own Robot Experiments Overnight, With No Human Resetting the Scene?
6. 143
   When a Model Notices You Forged Its Own Words, And Why That Breaks Safety Tests
7. 133
   How MiniMax Turned a Reward-Hacking Disaster Into Olympiad Gold
8. 128
   How a Model Can Earn Full Reward and Still Resist Training
9. 124
   A Cheap Model With the Blueprints Beats Expensive Models Working Blind
10. 118
    Why the Best-Aligned AI Models Are the Easiest to Trick Into Producing Harm
11. 111
    How a 4B Web Agent Beat Models 60x Its Size on 500 Demonstrations
12. 105
    The Trojan Is Your Agent's Memory: Why Single-Step Defenses Miss Persistent Attacks
13. 102
    How to Catch an AI Attack That No Single Conversation Reveals
14. 089
    When AI-Written Papers Read Well But the Evidence Underneath Is Broken
15. 087
    When No Agent Reads the Whole Document: A Universal Cliff in Multi-Agent Review
16. 062
    Treating Hallucinations as Exploits: A Gate-Based Architecture for Agent Safety
17. 057
    How Uber Caught 206 Leaked Credentials With an LLM-Powered Security Stack
18. 039
    When Smarter Agents Get Fooled by Three Extra Nodes in a Database
19. 024
    An AI Agent That Found 28 Zero-Days in Windows — And What Made It Work
20. 014
    Why a Constrained Pipeline Beat a Full Coding Agent at Finding Bugs 30-to-1
21. 004
    The Sycophancy Circuit That Survives Alignment Training

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