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Brigitte Nerlich

Brigitte Nerlich

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Posts by Brigitte Nerlich

Gunfight at the O.K Corral; or how bacteria interact in popular science writing

For many years, I have been fascinated by war metaphors that people use to talk about bacteria, especially in the context of antimicrobial resistance, the microbiome and microbiology itself. I am not the only one, of course. There is a thriving literature on war metaphors relating to bacteria that started to expand after Joshua Lederberg …

Organoid Intelligence

I have written about organoids and intelligence, especially of the artificial kind. However, I haven’t explored ‘organoid intelligence‘ until now. Despite this concept emerging around 2022, it escaped my attention. So, I have some catching up to do. In this post, I’ll first briefly define organoids and organoid intelligence. Then I’ll examine the pioneers who …

Playing with AI/Playing with fire

Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I have been fascinated by all new AIs that we can now ‘play’ with and that have made ‘artificial intelligence’ accessible to anybody who wants to give it a go. Remember the recipes for soup in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet or the Limericks on climate change …

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Superintelligence: From the divine to the digital and back again

The word ‘superintelligence’ has been bandied about a bit recently, most prominently by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who said in a blog post on 23 September, 2024: “This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a …

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Intelligence

Since the recent explosion of discussions around artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, even super-intelligence, people have started to wonder what intelligence actually is… A rather futile enterprise in my humble opinion, as ‘intelligence’ is a word like ‘love’ or ‘justice’ that has endless meanings, but there we are. Some scholars come at it from an …

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AI, LLMs and an explosion of metaphors

I would love to write a blog post entitled “What is it like to be an LLM”, but I have to leave that to others who are really into large language models or to the LLMs themselves. Instead, I have to resign myself to thinking about the question: “What is an LLM like?” This means …

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Mpox, again

On 14 August 2024 the WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that an upsurge of mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a growing number of countries in Africa constituted a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). This was the second time mpox had been declared a PHEIC. The last …

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From large language models to DNA language models

In October 2023 I wrote a blog post about a convergence of large language models or LLMs and DNA. LLMs are subset of generative AI that focus on generating and understanding human language and producing human-like text. DNA is often compared to a language or a code. In the post I quoted a representative of …

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Bio-hybrid robots and responsible innovation

Do you remember the film that I call in my mind ‘number five is alive’ or to give it its real name “Short Circuit”? It came out in 1986 and features an experimental robot that is struck by lightning, gains intelligence, escapes a military facility, and goes out to learn about the world. The abiding …

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Using Claude for science communication: The case of the genome as autoencoder

I am just back from a walk thinking about Kevin Mitchell and Nick Cheney’s recent paper (preprint) on the genome as autoencoder, rather than a blueprint or recipe. This paper caused quite a stir and you can find a good summary in this post by Jessica Hamzelou for the MIT Technology Review. Walking along, I …

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