Machines that learn. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.
On Its Head You Can Only Manage What You Can’t Measure Inside the box thinking Why Optimization Is Often Sub-Optimal Simplicity Is Overrated Right-Brain Analytics The New LBO: Left-Brain Outsourcing The Return…
Understanding Cognitive Biases Through a Sampling Limitations Framework: A Comprehensive Review and Theoretical Integration Abstract This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical framework that…
A one-way function is a fundamental concept in cryptography that's relatively easy to compute in one direction but extremely difficult to reverse. Let me explain with an example: Think of mixing paint colors -…
Here’s a clear comparison between recall and recognition, showing their differences in task demands and neuro-cognitive mechanisms. 1. Example Tasks Type Example Task Cognitive Demand --- --- --- Free Recall…
As a 30-year groupie of evolutionary computation, I am particularly sensitive to this trend: evolutionary AI is on the rise. The latest case in point, of course is @google deepmind’s AlphaEvolve, which uses…
I was heartbroken when Harvard Business Review editors decided to title my 2003 article “Don’t Trust Your Gut” ( certainly a buzzier catchphrase than “How To Leverage Your Intuition With Analytics” or other…
Kurt Vonnegut’s 152 novel, Player Piano, feels terrifyingly prescient: a dystopian society where machines and computers have replaced most human workers, leaving only engineers and managers with meaningful…
That's the title of a short IEEE Spectrum piece ( and a case in point as a second follow-up to Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf's post on how mediocre current hashtagAI systems, particularly hashtagLLMs, are at…
My mind was a little bit prepared this time. I love how Ethan Mollick shares his thoughts. And I love Bruce Sterling (the Sci Fi author who asked me a question about heuristocrats at etech 2006, a proud…
Recent studies of AI in medicine, particularly in imagery and diagnostic reasoning, have surfaced an alarming trend if we are to believe in AI as a way to augment human abilities: an expert aided by AI is not…
In a short Nature commentary "Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear," ( authors Eddy Keming Chen, Mikhail Belkin, Leon Bergen, and David Danks argue that the long-standing goal…
In a stimulating post (link in the comments), @bloomberg beta’s @roy bahat highlighted a fascinating 2017 (yes, 8 years ago!) study from this dense urban center that is @the university of Illinois…
Thank you for that post Conor Grennan. In a comment, Eric Fraser makes a great point -as someone who TRIED to use Coq, I can say that the learning curve is steep. On the other hand, the typical hashtaggenAI…
The idea that AI can empower beginners and non-experts as well as turbocharge the abilities and talent of experts is nicely summarized in this expression: AI can lower the floor and raise the ceiling. In other…
If you build a company that depends critically on another company's technology, your business is at the whim of that other company's strategy. It happened before with Google (e.g., changes in its ranking…
I am a scientist with lots of ideas, all the time. But I make a lot of calculation errors, and I am a slow coder. Most of my ideas go untested. On the flip side, I can easily and quickly verify whether a…
Jeremy Levin, my biggest issue with ACH has always been how flippantly the "CH" part of it has been treated compared to the quasi-monopolistic focus on the "A": where do the competing hypotheses come from, how…
A recent article about "hashtagAI Deception" ("AI deception: A survey of examples, risks, and potential solutions": reviews some AI systems' "ability to deceive via techniques such as manipulation, sycophancy,…
The @PNAS paper by Reese A. K. Richardson (Northwestern University), Spencer S. Hong (Northwestern University), Jennifer A. Byrne (University of Sydney), Luís A. Nunes Amaral (Northwestern University), “The…
In his 60 minutes interview with Anderson Cooper two years ago, legendary music producer Rick Rubin gave viewers, as usual, incredible insights into his success and also about the future (of humans and AI).…
In this recent Scientific American article, a well known historian of science provides a rather misleading description of Occam's razor or, more precisely, offers "counterexamples" that are not. The author's…
In a fun and short speculative PNAS article titled “Could humans and AI become a new evolutionary individual?” (PNAS 122 (2025) No. 37 e250122122), Paul Rainey (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in…
Before Insilico Medicine, Recursion, Atomwise and many others, CoalesiX, launched in 2006, used another form of AI, Evolutionary Computation (EC), to turbocharge the ability of medicinal chemists to explore a…
With all the healthy chatter about "verifiability" ignited by Andrej Karpathy, I want to point out that even if "verifying" (a program) can be hard, it is still easier than coming up with a good idea for a…
An interesting paper by the research nonprofit METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research) titled "Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks"(link in comments) has been generating some deserved buzz. But it…
This 8-years old video by Josh Gaines (aka Josh Darnit) has re-emerged recently —for good reason! (Notice the super intentional emdash). The Exact Instructions Challenge is a great reminder that "English is…
At a time of tense relationships between the USA and Europe, I think I have found the reason . When you are a French-American citizen, you have to entertain two opposing ideas at all times : a leisurely lunch…
Some 27 years ago, I was so impressed by Pablo Funes' work (with his PhD advisor the always ideating Jordan Pollack) (P. Funes and J.B. Pollack, “Evolutionary Body Building: Adaptive Physical Designs for…
TL;DR: leaderboard rankings are unreliable This picture is worth a t̶h̶o̶u̶s̶a̶n̶d̶ billion words . Based on an preprint on the ArXiv server (The Leaderboard Illusion) by a team led by Shivalika Singh, Marzieh…
After yesterday's post on the narrow search effect (how prior beliefs influence how you search for information, leading [usually] to search results that tend to confirm and/or reinforce said beliefs) I decided…
A beloved French TV personality, Bernard Pivot passed away two weeks ago at 8. His literary shows, including his flagships "Apostrophes" and "Bouillon de Culture", were cultural gems, which inspired James…
A study by Eugine Leung and Oleg Urminsky showed up in my feed today through Richard Hahn by way of Stefano Puntoni (thank you all!!). "The narrow search effect and how broadening search promotes belief…
Ok, by evolution I mean evolutionary computing (EC), meaning algorithms inspired by natural evolution such as genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, genetic programming and more. Why? Everyone, their…
I have heard or read this so many times it is infuriating: LLMs are not smart because they just do "next-token prediction". Whether or not LLMs are smart or can reason or have feelings (they don't ), they are…
That’s the title of blog post by @jesse johnson, Scaling Biotech. I believe, with characteristic humility, that the question is ill-posed, even though the framework the author proposes can be useful in…
...until a large number of vulnerabilities can be addressed. The “vibe workflow” mindset that has dominated the agentic space is creating a ton of opportunities for bad actors to exploit and a lot of failure…
I have had it with the pointless AGI talk (will it be 2027, 2035, or is "it" already here?), the slow singularity (can you feel it?) but also the recent flare up about whether LLMs are "thinking". Both the…
This may be controversial. But useful for the many who are "spiritual but not religious". Most organized religions create a sense of community and have regular practices, some individuals, most collective.…
Wow, I find myself agreeing with Stephen Wolfram much more than I expected! It is also possible, as I am almost certain he would argue, that I fully misunderstood his points. But I think he nails it on many…
At the start of 2025, DeepSeek AI took the Western AI ecosystem by storm. The team was able to meet or beat state-of-the-art benchmark targets with a smaller, clever model running on non-state-of-the-art GPUs…
I have been thinking a lot about “surprising behavior,” including unintended consequences, from algorithms that rely one way or another on optimization under constraint. That includes a lot of AI models as…
In one version of the report ( the authors discuss the Iceberg Index, a measure of "where AI capabilities overlap with human skills before adoption crystallizes" in a sort of digital twin of the US labor…
In one version of the report ( the authors discuss the Iceberg Index, a measure of "where AI capabilities overlap with human skills before adoption crystallizes" in a sort of digital twin of the US labor…
Companies are seeing small to moderate gains from genAI ( even though an increasing percentage of people are using AI at work, 30%-60% across many disciplines. A quick look at the list of tasks compiled…
I have always been slightly uncomfortable with the idea of "ambient AI", AI that listens and watches you and makes decisions on your behalf because "it knows you." The problem, for me, is that it can nudge…
There is this concept of AI-driven cognitive atrophy going around. It may happen, there is ample evidence that our ability to perform some tasks degrades when we stop performing them. But the key here is to…
The title of a recent preprint from an @amd team (Chaitanya Manem, Pratik Prabhanjan Brahma, Prakamya Mishra, Zicheng Liu and Emad Barsoum) got me excited for a moment: “SAND-Math: Using LLMs to Generate…
Fun preprint I just came across through the ICLR 2025 submissions site ( Even though it is still a preprint, there have been extensive reviews. First, I think the authors from Google, Google DeepMind, Google…
I am utterly disappointed in “nice guy” @brian chesky’s unwavering support of @sam altman. Chesky’s description of his role during the short firing of Altman from OpenAI is nothing short of sycophantic: poor…
Many have seen this chart of the "number of questions asked on stack overflow" over time and concluded, rightly, that ChatGPT precipitated its demise. The story is more complicated, and some it is explained in…
A clever computational model leveraging differential exposures to daylight by US location and the CDC PLACES health data by county was used to determine the possible health outcomes of switching from the…
Sometimes a Quanta Magazine article makes me feel like I understand something very complex and it is only when I try to explain it to someone else, or to myself, that I realize I didn't understand much at all.…
This is very different from what I usually write about. The podcast Rwanda Rising ( is an ode to humanity and resilience, hope and even joy in the face of unspeakable evil. Agatha (Agathe) is a genocide…
This article from @Anil Ananthaswamy for @quanta magazine (my favorite science magazine!) delivers a concise description of my own experience of using AI for scientific discovery: - Hallucinations are a…
Apparently an OpenAI employee claims that they have already achieved hashtagAGI, or perhaps AGI-, not AGI++: "better than most humans at most tasks". I find this annoying and problematic. Annoying because some…
This graph is from an article in The Economist on 7/14/2025 (AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?). The first-order interpretation is that traditional search is imploding: people are increasingly…
I always struggle a bit with I'm asked about the "hallucination problem" in LLMs. Because, in some sense, hallucination is all LLMs do. They are dream machines. We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts…
A super interesting article in PNAS, "AI–AI bias: Large language models favor communications generated by large language models" by Walter Laurito (FZI Research Center for Information Technology), Benjamin…
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, 143, showing more restraint than npm package authors In lieu of my favorite cartoons, I will be sharing a sequence of spot-on,…
There is something happening in all kinds of business contexts, but most prevalent in the expensive content business, aka consulting: a lot of mediocre content (AI slop) is being generated by AI tools,…
At a recent "Workshop on AI in the Cloud" at UC Berkeley organized by Industry-Academia Partnership (IAP, see Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley Professor and a co-founder of Databricks, Anyscale, LMArena) gave a…
That's an observation from "Artificial intelligence tools expand scientists’ impact but contract science’s focus," an article by 郝千越, Fengli Xu, Yong LI and James Evans that has been circulating as a preprint…
There is much I dislike about Ted Chiang's manifesto in The New Yorker two weeks ago ( But his narrow understanding of AI, and specifically gen AI and LLMs, is a topic for another time. A more positive take…
I found a description of the following experiment at (an intriguing discussion of AlphaGo's famous "random" or "genius" move 37). These two pictures were presented in 166 by A. Michael Noll, a Bell Labs…
Precision matters. Or why English is NOT the new programming language. I really like Erik Brynjolfsson's work and thinking. This figure from his 2022 article in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Daedalus…
We deserve better than a vague, self-serving, oversimplifying, unserious, overhyped “report” about the 5% failure rate of AI pilots in organizations (@kervin Werbach has a great post about this marketing…
Finally, a sound reminder that AI, in and of itself, is not creating a NEW, SUSTAINABLE advantage for companies that adopt it. The article, by Jay Barney and Martin Reeves in the upcoming issue of Harvard…
On the topic of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", I always thought that the claims made from Stranford's Walter Mischel's famous "Marshmallow Test" required better evidence. For example,…
As we're witnessing generative exaggeration in humans on social media discussing LLM social agents (or artificial social crustaceans as David Ha would put it), a timely article by Walter Quattrociocchi and…
I really, really enjoy Jeremy Howard 's thoughts... usually. A few weeks ago, he came up with a thread on X (as older people, formerly known as Twitter ) ( that can be summarized by one the posts: "Absolutely…
A 2001 picture of Salesforce founder Marc Benioff feels very relevant. The rather indiscriminate "saaspocalypse" and its modern prophets of software doom should remember that back in 2001, according to…
12 years ago, as an ignorant and self-confident (the two often come as a bundle) founding Dean of Computational Sciences, I discovered Allen Downey's blog and books and used them as inspiration to create a…
Thank you for that Charles H. Martin, PhD. I am lucky to have collaborated with Jack Cowan at Bios Group in the 10s, where he regaled us with how he had actually worked and became friends with McCulloch and…
Lots of insights to unpack in Gigi Levy-Weiss's latest post on the NFX blog. And perhaps a few provocative ideas that don't apply everywhere all the time. But it captures the zeitgeist and zeroes in on…
Lots of insights to unpack in Gigi Levy-Weiss's latest post on the NFX blog. And perhaps a few provocative ideas that don't apply everywhere all the time. But it captures the zeitgeist and zeroes in on…
I love love love Jim Fan's commentary on OpenAI's o3 latest FrontierMath benchmark results, in some ways a super-intelligence tour de force. I like the concept of "single-point [RL] super-intelligence" the…
I don't know Lauren Ducrey but she recently posted what I think is the most concise summary of the uses of hashtaggenAI: "This is my biggest question when I'm using AI: Am I being lazy or am I being curious?"…
I totally agree with Ethan Mollick's assessment. Notwithstanding the fact that I am tired of AGI, I would go a little further. A slightly different task can indeed produce a drastically different performance,…
I didn't pay much attention to this article ("Bayesian teaching enables probabilistic reasoning in large language models", Linlu Qiu, Fei Sha, Kelsey Allen, Yoon Kim, Tal Linzen & Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Nat…
I love to read about Terence Tao's incredibly insightful experience reports with gen AI, in particular with chatGPT and now the new o1-preview model ( His goal when using an AI is to support him in solving…
On 12/2/18, I saw my name for the first time in print in the US [the very first press mention came in Le Monde on 12/2/15 for a Science Magazine article] based on an interview with Sue Goetinck Ambrose of the…
My apologies for being all over the place today, that's the problem when living at the intersection of AI, bio and aging. But one piece of news yesterday caught my attention: GitHub announced the launch of the…
One consequence of the current genAI hype is companies, large and small, rushing to apply it to use cases that are either inappropriate or for which the technology is not yet ready. Of course, the more…
A new wave of AI generation tools for images and videos has triggered a lot of excitement and fear. The reaction goes something like this: "Wow! Look at how realistic this image is. Can you tell this image is…
Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan nail it in this short and delightful article in IEEE Spectrum. Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger,…
That's the title of a fantastic blog post by Anu A. (link in the comments). The snapshot from jack friks is from the post and I included it because I can relate soooooo much. Another nugget comes from a link…
It's a fascinating exploration of Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Haiku model. Lots of interesting findings based on the concept of "attribution graphs", which reveal computational graphs in LLMs, showing how different…
Can't argue with the title of this SEMAFOR article by Reed Albergotti. Yes, this week (or the past month) was Anthropic's DeepSeek moment on Wall Street. But this time it was felt broadly by the "software…
I am late to the armchair quarterbacking on DeepSeek, as I wanted to let the dust settle a little before forming an opinion. I think this work by a team from HKU, University of California, Berkeley, Google…
A Communications of the ACM article ( with that title by Victor Dibia, PhD of Microsoft Research summarizes how many people in the field (people whose job it is to keep up with AI research) feel, especially if…
My favorite line from Arcadia, a 13 play by Tom Stoppard, the incredibly smart and witty British playwright and writer who passed away this week at 88. Funnily enough, Arcadia is not mentioned in his BBC…
An intriguing article, "How Might Artificial Intelligence Influence Human Evolution?" by Robert C Brooks (UNSW in Sydney) is exploring the possible impact of hashtagAI on the hashtagevolution of our species…
The concept of "jagged frontier", introduced about two years ago (Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, Ethan Mollick, Dr. H /Hila Lifshitz (Hán, X也), Katherine Kellogg, Saran Rajendran, Lisa Krayer, PhD,…
The concept of "jagged frontier", introduced about two years ago (Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, Ethan Mollick, Dr. H /Hila Lifshitz (Hán, X也), Katherine Kellogg, Saran Rajendran, Lisa Krayer, PhD,…
I find this article by Rachel Draelos, MD, PhD super insightful. Beyond the obvious implications for medicine, it also raises questions/issues that apply to a lot of different contexts. Of the four problems…
Tim O'Reilly wrote a concept-rich piece that I found incredibly novel and refreshing. Lots of ideas in Tim's article, and the one that stuck is best captured here: "... in the long term, if people stop…
Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders penned an insightful opinion piece in IEEE Spectrum (link in comments), specifically in the context of security, but with broader applicability. Millions of users of genAI…
The first evening at DOC, we got Reid Hoffman, Mike Krieger, Anitha Kannan, Neil Parikh debating whether AI will replace doctors, with Jordan Shlain, MD as moderator. Two versions of Anthropic's Claude…
In my daily newsletter from MIT Technology Review today, there was a (paywalled) story about paleo robots as models of prehistoric animals: "In the last few years, paleontologists have developed a new trick…
Here is a clever experiment, and one with interesting implications for AI-human interactions. But should we be really surprised that what is essentially a sampler of (a large percentage of all English) written…
An article in Nature today (behind paywall, Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research) raises some interesting issues and questions about the use of hashtagai and…
Delusional. If you need "founder mode" at a $82bn (market cap) company to make its customer service work, something is wrong. I am obviously not talking about Twitter, sorry, X since it is worth a lot less…
In a conversation with economist Tyler Cowen last month, Peter Thiel expresses his view that hashtagLLMs will make things "worse for the math people than the word people." He continues: "What people have told…
I am on a roll. Two French intellectuals/philosophers analyzed the world around them almost 200 years ago (Tocqueville: Democracy in America, 1835 French and 1838 English) and 75 years ago (Weil: On the…
I recently had the privilege of hearing about an unpublished study that would save (academic, corporate or nonprofit) scientists in the field a lot of misery if they knew about it. But the study “failed” in…
The ability to create agentic workflows that can call tools and LLMs (Large Language Models) is opening up a universe of possibilities (and dangers too, but that’s for another post). Among them is verification…
In the first week of January 2026, I have finally caught up with Andrej Karpathy: I am overwhelmed. I have crossed a threshold that I don't know how to uncross: I am spending more than 5 hours daily trying to…
There is the occasional interdisciplinary physics paper that I find insightful and this is one of them: Nonuniversality for crossword puzzle percolation, by Alexander Hartmann of the Carl von Ossietzky…
Anna Marie Wagner and Christina Agapakis thank you for this! When I read Ted Chiang's article last September I thought it was really weak and disappointing as an argument for why AI can't make art (although I…
Right off the heels of Anthropic’s announcement that it is “donating the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, co-founded by Anthropic,…
What an incredibly naive statement Andrew Ng , that we will see it coming when AI wants to deceive us. AI is already deceiving us in so many ways, from social algorithms (think TikTok) that lead to addiction…
Here is a nice opinion piece in PNAS by Ross Hammond and Shari Barkin that makes a strong case for combining ABM and RCTs to alleviate the intrinsic limitations of RCTs, particularly when interactions between…
An interesting strategy+business article ( has an intriguing set of estimates of hashtaggenAI impact on operating profit margins in a variety of industries. There is so much to criticize. For example, this is…
An important Nature paper by a Google DeepMind team (first author Junhyuk Oh) became available online unedited to accelerate the dissemination of ideas: this paper shows that Reinforcement Learning (RL)…
Cool Springer Nature article on "emergent misalignment" (Training large language models on narrow tasks can lead to broad misalignment, Jan Betley, Niels Warncke, Anna Sztyber, Daniel Tan, Xuchan Bao,Martín…
Ethan Mollick doesn't need more publicity... but I think this is important: genAI is empowering "the masses" to do things that were out of reach before, not just experts and nerds . What they produce may not…
I hadn't thought of it but AI compute as part of your compensation package kind of makes sense if you are working in AI (and let's be honest, who is not working in AI? Just kidding but I do live in the Bay…
AI hashtagagents have been around for quite some time ("multi-agent systems" are one classical embodiment), but of course in 2024 hashtagLLM Agents are all the rage. With the explosion of hashtagagentic…
In last week's issue of Science Magazine, Melanie Mitchell reminded us that the narratives we weave depend crucially on the metaphors we use to describe a situation, an event, a concept, a tool, or hashtagAI.…
Oh me . . . The protagonist student (who today would be called a user) knows that +4 is not 3. Therein lies a lesson that applies to LLMs and other blackboxy contraptions: you better have knowledge of the…
A set of recent experiments with large language models (hashtagLLM) such as hashtagchatGPT suggest that using super-long prompts that contain up to hundreds or even thousands of examples outperforms…
In continuing with the idea (or my theory) that the ability to evaluate/critique/curate the output is the critical skill required to extract value out of hashtaggenAI (more so than prompting), once again Ethan…
After seeing Hector Zenil's most recent preprint on arXiv ( not being aware of the history behind the animosity (see blog link below), I thought it was a hit piece on the team behind Assembly Theory. Even…
Of course this caught my attention: LLMs and Swarm Intelligence! According to this study by a team from Renmin University of China, LLMs differ significantly in decentralized swarm scenarios based on their…
Perhaps my biggest source of quotables came (unexpectedly?) from You.com's brilliant founder and CEO Richard Socher during his hashtaghumanx Q&A session. In order of appearance during the session: 1⃣ He said…
Daniel Kahneman passed away at 0. He was not just a 2002 Nobel laureate in economics and the co-creator with the late Amos Tversky of some of the most insightful (and simple) psychology experiments that paved…
Very cool article in Science Magazine (Luke D. Fannin (Dartmouth College), Chalachew Seyoum (University of Arizona), Vivek Venkataraman (University of Calgary), Justin Yeakel (yay Santa Fe Institute!!),…
Sorry to be the Grinch here, but while this technology looks impressive, the example you chose for your demo video, Charles A. Kantor, is highly problematic. Ask any recruiter or anyone who has ever used…
Without any particular target in mind (or too many to list ), I like to remind myself on occasion that outsized success is not usually a consequence of outsized skill and talent but of outsized risk taking and…
Fascinating preprint by some reasonably credible mathematicians (Terence Tao, Javier Gómez-Serrano) working with Google DeepMind's Bogdan Georgiev and Adam Zsolt Wagner: MATHEMATICAL EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY…
I'll end this series of yummy quotables with Mistral AI's founder and CEO Arthur Mensch. Arthur is very serious (in public), so here are two serious takes from his fireside chat: 1⃣ "LLMs are not intrinsically…
A nuanced post well worth reading about chatbots and mental health from someone who knows a little bit about the space, Thomas Insel MD. 1⃣ The idea of mental health chatbots as first line/triage/gateway: "It…
Every time I think of ways to make decisions fairer, I realize very quickly that fairness is not a one-dimensional concept, in fact it is a high-dimensional, multi-faceted ball of complexity. Not only may…
A lot of reactions yesterday about the acqui-partnership between OpenAI and Jony Ive. But after I came across (thank you Carmen!) this short comment in Nature Communications ( by Andy Clark, one of the best…
Not disagreeing with the conclusion ("stay invested") but the "missing the 10 best days" argument always makes me laugh. So I decided to calculate the annualized returns when missing the worst trading days. It…
As we say on LinkedIn, I am hashtaghumbled and hashtaghonored to have been voted the most Eric Bonabeau lookalike by hysterical hordes of fans in one of the most hashtaglandslide way possible. The pluralistic…
Fascinating article in Science on "The levers of political persuasion with conversational artificial intelligence" by a multidisciplinary team (Kobi Hackenburg, Ben Tappin, Luke Hewitt, Ed Saunders, Sid Black,…
Fascinating article in Science on "The levers of political persuasion with conversational artificial intelligence" by a multidisciplinary team (Kobi Hackenburg, Ben Tappin, Luke Hewitt, Ed Saunders, Sid Black,…
Dario Amodei's article "Machines of Loving Grace", with a title inspired by Richard Brautigan's 167 poem, is a great read. Introducing himself as a "perceived pessimist" is a little bit of a strawman... but I…
The delightfully named Bullshit Benchmark (really the BS Detection Benchmark) by Peter Gostev is really worth looking at. Yet another benchmark you say? Another benchmark, yes, but one that addresses how LLM…
An interesting statement made by Erik Brynjolfsson during his AI, Science and Society Conference hashtagAIActionSummit at École Polytechnique/Institut Polytechnique de Paris. The "at least for now" part. Erik…
I will come back to the topic of food printing in the context of generative thinking -and, of course, generative AI. That was the reason behind our first (2005) foray into food printing and the premise of…
My family's terrible sense of (market) timing must be genetic... ... I think. I found this surprising stock certificate for the Bonabeau Enterprise (I had no idea there was such as thing) dated 15 January 12.…
Thank you Kes Sampanthar for your read on this paper. All the assumptions made by Daron, all the things he neglects, suggest a linear approximation whereby he applies a very short term gradient (most gains…
A Perspectives article from June 2024 is making the case, as its title indicates, for language as a tool for communication rather than thought. Regardless of where you fall on this longstanding philosophical…
A fascinating (and a little scary) study on variance in values across 76 countries: Not surprisingly, homosexuality, euthanasia, divorce top the diverged leaderboard. The leading converged values: more…
Fine, I never was, but I found this intro from James Fallows in March 2011 that comes as close as it gets to the proof of the possibility that I could have been in another life. Jim had introduced me to the…
Ethan Mollick 's post on capability thresholds (distributed unevenly) greatly clarifies the concept of jagged frontier: thousands or millions of human "tasks" that seem equally difficult to a human can have…
This is a very interesting development coming out of Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati's company. But what caught my attention when following the link is that Danny Hillis is cited right at the top of the…
A short Science Magazine review worth reading (sadly not Open Access) by Nils Opel and Michael Breakspear "Transforming mental health research and care through artificial intelligence." There have been…
An exciting article from (the always insightful) Mikhail Belkin and colleagues got its first release in Science Magazine a few days ago (paywall). A preprint version from May 2023 is available ( The main…
Ok, a little different from food printing. A Nature article today adds to the inflection point that AI is creating in science and engineering advances. One of the big (multiple) obstacles to achieve fusion…
So it looks like the way I appropriated this quote is: "Managers would rather live with a problem they can't solve than with a solution they don't understand", according to GovExec: But, unsurprisingly, I…
I have found surprisingly few mentions of this so far, but I am sure (I hope) it will become obvious: the future belongs to critical thinkers and curators, humans who can detect the relevant patterns but not…
The CEO of Klarna, the famous F̶i̶r̶e̶ ̶N̶o̶w̶,̶ ̶R̶e̶h̶i̶r̶e̶ ̶L̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ Buy Now, Pay Later fintech company, said in an on-stage interview at SXSW London that "offering human customer service is always going…
If you have never read, or don't know about, Shel Silverstein's The Homework Machine (from the book of poems A Light in the Attic, first published by Harper & Row Junior Books in 181), here it is. 44 years…
Matt Watson I am reaching the same conclusion but with a twist. The ability to evaluate the output is what matters most: if I can look at the output code and determine whether or not it does what I want…
A recent (humorous) post by Eduardo Ordax brought back memories of my 2004 Harvard Business Review article "The Perils of the Imitation Age", where I quoted (then fashionable) former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan,…
Not that I am that excited (or end-of-the-world worried) about hashtagAGI, but I agree wholeheartedly with François Chollet that "hashtagLLMs have sucked the oxygen out of the room." OpenAI's hashtagchatgpt…
A great take on hashtaggenAI hallucinations by Colin F. "Hallucinations", however we define the concept, are a core property (and perhaps the core value proposition) of LLMs and genAI systems. My view: Trying…
I should add to my earlier post about Colin F.'s blog on hashtagLLM and hashtaggenAI hallucinations that (the always interesting) Andrej Karpathy is enthusiastically embracing the idea of hallucinations being…
Field of view (k): A moderate view size (e.g., k=5) balances environmental awareness and perceptual complexity, optimizing performance for most tasks. Group size (N): Larger groups improve tasks like Transport…
Reid Hoffman I particularly like your "blind spot" comment. In venture capital there is a (very human) tendency to look for things that have "worked in the past" while at the same time pretending to support…
is a unique human being in the world of AI. A "recovering statistician", she wonders who decides that something should be measured, worth applying statistics to, that something matters. That applies to the…
Some 18 years ago, with Hod Lipson, we were dreaming up a 3d printer/food replicator that would one day be on everyone's kitchen countertop, just like a food processor. You would buy the ingredient cartridges,…
Bill Viola, the "Rembrandt of the video age", passed away on July 12th after a long struggle with Alzheimer's Disease. I encountered his work for the first time at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 17. It…
Thank you Compound and Dr. Shelby for maintaining this repository of hashtagtechbio foundation models. I don't know whether to be excited by a Cambrian explosion of LLMs for bio or deflated by the emerging…
As I am (obviously) going through a late-mid-life crisis and also through my archives in a hopeless attempt to de-clutter, I find little nuggets from the past. Here a pic with the amazing NYT journalist Frank…
Prompt injections in the physical world are not as far-fetched as you might think. When input data is code, sht will hit the fan. Worth reading the article by Luis Burbano, Diego Ortiz Barbosa, Qi (Laura) Sun,…
Science paper ( with unsurprising but specific results. The authors measured the fraction of Python functions in more than 30 million GitHub commits from 160k software developers they could detect were…
... that's a quote from Redditor GreenVideo831 ( We have William Gibson's old joke to be grateful for ( The future is already here, [thank goodness] it is just unevenly distributed. ("Thank goodness" not part…
Bonabeau circa 2014, attempting to explain Minerva University's Formal Analyses curriculum to our first prospective cohort. And with that, the famous "What IS Formal Analyses?" What a blast, 2013-2016, for…
Day 2 in John Koenig's rabbit hole, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, another concept that resonates in the age of AI everywhere. Now the PhD student's nightmare is widely shared. Pax latrina I recently…
Don't forget to state the constraints or your chatbot (or Claude Code) will find shady shortcuts and loopholes. When you live in flatland, shortcuts abound in the third dimension. Sadly, the infinite richness…
Communication plays a minor role compared to physical dynamics. Features like message length and semantic consistency show weak correlations with task success. Models differ in their communication styles, with…
High behavioral variability (e.g., entropy in actions) correlates positively with performance, suggesting that flexibility in decision-making aids coordination. Excessive movement or persistent alignment…
Open-endedness represents perhaps the most profound challenge in computational science: how do systems transcend their initial constraints to generate genuinely novel, complex, and meaningful structures? This…
Open-endedness has emerged as a fundamental concept across multiple computational domains, representing systems' capacity for continuous novelty generation, unbounded complexity growth, and non-convergent…
Eli Lilly's Chorus unit, established in 2002, emerged as one of the most successful innovations in pharmaceutical R&D productivity, achieving 3-10x productivity improvements over traditional development models…
Open-endedness represents one of the most profound and elusive concepts in computational science, spanning domains from artificial life to creative systems. Rather than focusing on specific algorithms, this…
Gordon Pask's electrochemical devices represent one of the most remarkable achievements in cybernetics and early artificial life research. Between the 150s and 160s, Pask constructed genuinely self-organizing…
Gordon Pask's electrochemical devices from the 150s and 160s are entirely unique in AI history because they challenged conventional computational orthodoxy by demonstrating that complex intelligence,…
That’s the title of a great Trends in Biotechnology article led by @the align foundation’s @erika debenedictis. I loved the preprint, I am thrilled to see it published. The Align Foundation is a @schmidt…
I saw a post by @juergen schmidhuber recently ( that gave me pause. About convolutional neural networks and the neocognitron, a 17-80 neural network architecture by the Japanese scientist Kunihiko Fukushima (…
I was struck by a statement I read today about a Techbio company that "uses large language models to create billions of druglike molecules". I have nothing against this company and I think they do very…
I was heartbroken when Harvard Business Review editors decided to title my 2003 article “Don’t Trust Your Gut” ( certainly a buzzier catchphrase than “How To Leverage Your Intuition With Analytics” or other…
That's my favorite quote from Derek Lowe's Science opinion, "The End of Disease". And Derek was kind enough to collect links to all his AI-based drug discovery opinions from the past few years, a treasure…
I am sure many have seen this Y Combinator's Summer 2025 Request for Startups by Jared Friedman. When I founded Icosystem in 2000, I had this exact concept in mind: if we can do analytics and machine learning…
Scientists from the University of Basel in Switzerland studied the exploratory behavior of different species of cichlid fish from Africa’s Lake Tanganyika. The 240 species found in the lake evolved from the…
As Insilico Medicine has released fascinating R&D benchmarks ( I find it useful to get back to basics to understand the fundamentals. Borrowing from what I consider the gold standard in defining it (2010…
I saw a post by Jürgen Schmidhuber recently (all links in comments) that gave me pause . About convolutional neural networks and the neocognitron, a 17-80 neural network architecture by the Japanese scientist…
In a recent substack post ( the always insightful Rishad Tobaccowala presents "10 thoughts about AI, Humans and Work in 10 minutes". They are all worth pondering (although I would not invoke Suleyman in 3) but…
Or, evolving on chemical space(s)! The appeal of the concept for me comes from the fact that the topology of a chemical space (the "construction operators") and its boundary conditions are so natural to map to…
Always stimulated by Derek Lowe's writings (in spite of an average 50% agreement rate), I tried (a condensed version of) his OpenAI Deep Research prompt on the toxic effects of thalidomide with Perplexity Deep…
What sounded like a (half-)joke by Joanna Maciejewska ( a little less than two years ago feels a bit more urgent today. Obviously, it resonated then with a lot of people, generating 3.3M views on X and…
An intriguing article ("Imbalance in gut microbial interactions as a marker of health and disease", Roberto Corral López, Juan Bonachela, Maria Gloria Dominguez Bello, Michael Manhart, Simon Levin, Martin…
Great post by Ash Jogalekar. Drug discovery is still a prime example of "competence without comprehension" ( we build things that work without always understanding how or why. When a mechanism of action (MOA)…
Anastasia Borovykh, you are right, humans are good at "taste", knowing what is interesting or not, distinguishing what's meaningful from what is just truth without meaning. Human taste is found at the two end…
An interesting take from one of the most brilliant minds of microbiology, Itzhak Mizrahi. I love the paper he is highlighting, the results are impressive and exciting, it took a lot of "fundamental…
So there is a lot to unpack in Elliot's latest post. To be clear, I am not trying to unpack Elliot but his post . TL;DR: disruption is here, commoditization is coming and the nexus (or nexi, nexuses?) of value…
A useful preprint (Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce; by Stanford University's Yijia Shao, Humishka Zope , Yucheng Jiang, Jiaxin Pei, David…
I love this introduction to scent design by Taylor Rayne at Asimov Press (Scent, in silico, and the role that machine learning and genAI is playing in the field's recent advances: Google DeepMind's Principal…
Super-interesting Nature Medicine article (A multimodal sleep foundation model for disease prediction, link in comments) from a team supervised by Emmanuel JM Mignot and James Zou at Stanford University…
Some folks are wondering why all of a sudden their LinkedIn feed is inundated with my posts and in particular a picture of a much younger-looking Bonabeau eating a 3D-printed appetizer in a weird T-shirt. Both…
Some folks are wondering why all of a sudden their LinkedIn feed is inundated with my posts and in particular a picture of a much younger-looking Bonabeau eating a 3D-printed appetizer in a weird T-shirt. Both…
I just received Blaise Aguera y Arcas's wonderful little treasure, 'What is Life?", a play on Erwin Schrödinger's opus of the same title, published as the first tome of the Antikythera series as part of…
A recent fantastic Science Magazine article by a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by Richard Young and Henry Kilgore of the Whitehead Institute and Regina Barzilay of MIT Computer Science…
Intriguing article by a team led by Moritz Gerstung (DKFZ German Cancer Research Center), Tom Fitzgerald and Ewan Birney (European Bioinformatics Institute EMBL-EBI Hinxton, UK) reporting on the use of…
The eminently quotable Alex Zhavoronkov, the fearless founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, presented at hashtaghumanx on the same day Insilico announced $110m in funding ( to propel it to a Hong Kong IPO and…
Ok, that is my short summary interpretation (for AI nerds) of an intriguing article by a Cedars-Sinai-led team. From the abstract: "Here we characterized the representational geometry of populations of neurons…
Spurred by a conversation with Reid Hoffman at DOC, I dug out Phase II clinical trial success rates (Pts) since the 10s (I used public data for this as a good first approximation). Here is the trend line over…
This is a post by Nathan Benaich worth reading for anyone interested in hashtagAI and hashtagdrugdiscovery. The important TL;DR is that there is a lot to be excited about in spite of the recent failures of…
Now that the article is out and Open Access on Cell, I am reposting a comment I made a few months ago about a super interesting preprint, "How to Build the Virtual Cell with Artificial Intelligence: Priorities…
You can always count on Derek Lowe for an incisive (meaning, with tooth) analysis of a half-baked paper with a promising title ( While Derek focuses on the paper's poorly defined categories (can a target…
In 2011, I had the privilege of guest writing James Fallows' blog on The Atlantic for one week. One of the posts was about Darwin's "Strange Inversion of Reasoning" (the title of a 200 PNAS paper or…
Fantastic JPM26 Wing Venture Capital event with the inimitable Rajeev Chand touch! No attribution but a few tidbits: - Immigrants get the job done (tongue in cheek, wonder who might have said that ) - Patent…
Great article with a misleading title: "A synthetic protein-level neural network in mammalian cells" (Science Magazine: free bioRxiv & medRxiv preprint: The premise that cells are (fast) information-processing…
Allie K. Miller is pointing to the trigger point of a Cambrian explosion in innovation. People (myself included) have been criticizing the "chatbot interface" but it turns out that it is a super effective way…
It is important to recognize the crucial role played by large, well-organized data in the emergence of powerful AI methods. ImageNet is widely considered a catalyst for the sudden success of deep learning and…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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