Search for "artificial intelligence"

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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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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Talking with Claude about machine metaphors in biology

In my last blog post I said that I had writer’s block – and I still have. I said so to my son and whined a bit. He said: “Remember Christmas 2022? You were complaining about the same thing and I said, go and play with ChatGPT, which had just come out, and that got …

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Metaphor identification: From manual to automatic

I have written about metaphors for AIs and LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, but I don’t know much about what one might call the mechanics of metaphor recognition, identification and interpretation inside LLMs. So, I wanted to find out and went down a rabbit hole – I never quite reached the bottom…. Metaphor and …

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AI safety: It’s everywhere but what is it?

AI Safety is the new black. It is everywhere. As Alex Hern wrote from the Seoul AI safety summit on Tuesday “The hot AI summer is upon us” and with it the hot AI safety summer…. When you look at this timeline for “AI safety” on the news database Nexis, you can see that the …

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From contamination to collapse: On the trail of a new AI metaphor

I wrote my first ever post about AI and ChatGPT on 6 January 2023. Amongst other things, I talked about the danger of ‘knowledge pollution’. I wanted to highlight the dangers of a gradual corruption of our knowledge base. Knowledge pollution ChatGPT and many other bots or AIs like it are based on large language …

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Making science public 2023: End-of-year round up of blog posts

The year 2023 began with a bang. Suddenly there was a new form of ‘artificial intelligence’, and by ‘new’ I mean a form of AI that even I could use and vaguely understand. There was, it seems, some monstrous machine (called LLM) gobbling up everything we have ever produced in science, literature and art and …

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Frontier AI: Tracing the origin of a concept

The UK government has convened an international AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire which will take place on 1 and 2 November, 2023. On 16 October the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology tweeted: “The agenda for the opening day of the #AISafetySummit has been published. The UK is laying out a focused plan …

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Red and blue AI?

This is another post about artificial intelligence or AI, but it’s what one may call a bit ‘experimental’. I happened to think about an analogy and ran with it, but it might be a completely inappropriate one. Let me know! Red and green GM About twenty years ago, at the turn of the millennium, I …

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Chatting with a chatbot about metaphor

A week ago my son sent me a link to a tweet in which Ethan Mollick did a little experiment with one of the currently fashionable AI chatbots, a common pastime nowadays. He asked “Bing to look up Tamarian, a made-up Star Trek language that works entirely by metaphors to Tamarian history and myth. Then …

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