This short film made with Seedance 2.0 is absolutely insane.The realism looks like a real movie — no one can…

Dog cockle, Glycymeris glycymeris

Stephen Wolfram, “Universality and Complexity in Cellular Automata”, Physica 10D (1984), 1-35
Synthetic data will be plenty and of a higher standard than human-produced
In recent weeks, I have had the privilege of speaking to audiences in Lille, Brussels and Nîmes about the societal and ethical dimensions of large language models (LLMs). These discussions, sparked by my latest book, La Singularité. L’humain ébranlé par l’intelligence artificielle, have brought me face-to-face with the pressing questions and challenges posed by artificial intelligence in our rapidly evolving world.
In the coming days, I will continue this journey with talks in Mulhouse and Paris, diving deeper into the transformative potential of LLMs and the profound ways they reshape our understanding of humanity and intelligence. These conversations are not…

Illustration by DALL·E
Updating the “us” within a technological context
In the same way as Linnæus positioned us among the anthropoid apes, now the existence of intelligent machines sets us in a family of intelligent beings where living creatures and machines rub shoulders and share similar brain architectures.
The better we understand how these LLMs are like us, the better we understand what variety of machine we most resemble. Boundaries are becoming blurred: could it be that it has now been irrefutably shown that humans were after…
Demis Hassabis, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in AI, is sceptical about an article published four days ago:

He does so (under a pseudonym) in the video below. What he says is very interesting (‘there’s no proof that there’s a slowdown’) but what I’d like to say (a comment on his comment) is a little different.
Here it is: the feeling of slowing down is due to an artefact, an error of perspective that we unconsciously introduce. (I’ll be speedy: this post is not a…

Illustration by DALL·E: “The human being worshipping his own intelligence”
Intelligence: A defining feature of our pride
Humankind’s intelligence has always been praised by humans as maybe their defining quality. Animals around us display some of this intelligence but to a lesser degree, what Rousseau called in a non-disparaging way, the “stupidity” of the animal. What would happen now if another entity were likely to rightly consider us stupid by comparison?
Since the origins of life there has been an objective motive for the human race to…

Illustration by DALL·E
Scaling up
A second source of our unpreparedness for an artificial intelligence better than ours is that the very way the overtaking occurred was unexpected being almost entirely due to a process of gain in size – the extra element being the ‘transformer’.
The route to synthesising human intelligence which turned out to be the right approach was counter-intuitive: the early prototype of an artificial neuronal network, the perceptron, was still only a moderately promising device. This elementary type of a connectionist model was harshly…

Illustration by DALL·E
AI has the great disadvantage of being … artificial
This does not mean however that scientific research had become an easy pursuit in the West from the 16th century onwards: the image of the tree of knowledge’s forbidden fruit maintained its lingering presence, manifesting itself in particular through an endemic denigration of technological innovation. Indeed, we in the West systematically devalue on an intellectual level our novel contributions to the world, our inventions, by deeming them “artificial”, a word with negative connotations and pejorative overtones, even…
A portrait of Tycho Brahe, Royal Astrologist of Danemark, by Stable Diffusion
Why were we caught off-guard by AI?
Despite artificial intelligence having been a field of research since the 1950s and the achievement of software of the type of LLMs having been an objective clearly stated from the outset and the research effort having been systematic, we as a species Homo Sapiens, do still not understand precisely what happened or why, and are just slowly recovering from our amazement, the prime example of our astonishment being of…
This short film made with Seedance 2.0 is absolutely insane.The realism looks like a real movie — no one can…
In the age of AI, the danger is not knowing less than machines, but understanding too slowly the structure of…
Ouch! The whole of cosmology was standing on its head, and now it’s back on its feet! And everything becomes…
To expand on this reflection, I’d like to propose an image that radically inverts our usual representation of the Big…
[…] GENESIS is a machine predicting where emergence will occur and what form it will take: the form that minimises descriptive length and maximises cross?representational coherence.…
[…] 2. Pribor’s Combinatorial Magic […]
[…] that’s left to do is get on with it ? So I followed DeepSeek’s advice, as I let you…
Well! It is comments such as yours that make the trip … worthy of the trouble! 😀
When I saw your work on P vs NP, I knew you were on to something profound. I couldn’t have…
Admittedly, I was a little thrown off by the direction this took. From my perspective, you (1) identified the major…
"L'avènement de la Singularité" "Thought as Word Dynamics" ANELLA A NEW "US" FOR NEW TIMES Angela Merkel Aristotle Artificial Intelligence Barclays Brexit capitalism CFRT Chair "Stewardship of Finance" China Claude 3 consciousness debt Donald Trump ECB EFSF emergence ESM Europe eurozone France GENESIS Germany GPT-4 Greece Herman Van Rompuy IMF Italy Jean-Claude Juncker José Manuel Barroso Large Language Models LIBOR linguistics LLM Mario Draghi Pribor.io Psychoanalysis P vs NP Spain speculation The Singularity United States