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On the puzzling behavior of generative AIs: What to make of recent interpretations of the inner workings of Claude, Anthropic’s large language model?
Illustration by DALL·E
On March 27, 2025, Anthropic published a set of innovative analyses in its article On the Biology of a Large Language Model (LLM), constituting an in-depth exploration of the internal workings of its Claude 3.5 Haiku…
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Video – Wow! Maya and I: Sci-Fi is Here to Stay!, March 9th 2025
Talking to the amazing new conversational tool from sesame.com
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Paris Defence and Strategy Forum – The Silent War and Strategic Mobilization in the Age of Infrastructure Warfare, March 12th 2025
Illustration by DALL·E
Blueprint for Paul Jorion’s Speech at Panel 3: The Silent War and Strategic Mobilization in the Age of Infrastructure Warfare
War must…
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“JESUS vs DONALD” #JvsD
Trumpism is no political system, it’s a cult: the cult of brute force, the cult of “If you’re not like me, i.e. a Straight White Rich Guy, go fuck yourself!”.
You don’t fight a cult with arguments, you fight it with a better cult: the cult of generosity, of openness of the heart, of compassion,…
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Intelligence & Société N°6, an English-speaking review by NotebookLM
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Intelligence & Société N°5, an English-speaking review by NotebookLM
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A Stephen Wolfram Tribute
Dog cockle, Glycymeris glycymeris
Stephen Wolfram, “Universality and Complexity in Cellular Automata”, Physica 10D (1984), 1-35
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Intelligence & Société N°3, an English-speaking review by NotebookLM
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Video – LLMs: Will we run out of data?
Synthetic data will be plenty and of a higher standard than human-produced
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Exploring the Frontiers of AI and Society: My Journey as a Speaker and Columnist
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…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XV. Updating the “us” within a technological context
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…
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“Progress in AI is slowing down” = fake news
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…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XIV. Intelligence: A defining feature of our pride
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…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XIII. Scaling up
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…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XII. AI has the great disadvantage of being … artificial
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…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XI. Why were we caught off-guard by AI?
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…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. X. The rise of the LLMs
Portrait of Geoffrey Hinton by Stable Diffusion
The rise of the LLMs
This is the way things stood before some recent events that led Geoffrey Hinton to make a disturbing statement. Geoffrey Hinton is the mastermind behind Large Language Models such…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. IX. Freud: The soul in the realm of suspicion
Illustration by DALL·E
Freud: The soul in the realm of suspicion
What Linnæus and Darwin had forced to reconsider was the notion of Man as having been created entirely separately from the “the beast of the earth according to its kind, cattle…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. VIII. Darwin: Man in a sequence
Illustration by DALL·E
Darwin: Man in a sequence
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the thinker who added a historical perspective to the picture Linnaeus had painted: animal species that look like each other in their skeleton necessarily evolved from a common ancestor.…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. VII. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Being more generous when defining Man
Illustration by DALL·E
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Being more generous when defining Man
The question of the “us” extends however beyond the borders of the Homo sapiens species. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) in his Essay on the origin of Inequality held the view that…