AI, LLMs and an explosion of metaphors
August 30, 2024
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 …
From large language models to DNA language models
August 9, 2024
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 …
Large language models, meaning and maths
July 26, 2024
I was reading an article in The Guardian about two novels by Benjamin Labatut. One novel, published in 2020, is entitled When We Cease to Understand the World and deals with quantum mechanics and war. The second novel The Maniac, published in 2023 and just out in paperback, is about John von Neumann, which brings …
Talking with Claude about machine metaphors in biology
July 12, 2024
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 …
Metaphor identification: From manual to automatic
June 28, 2024
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 …
How to do things with prompts: Magic words, speech acts and AI
June 21, 2024
Looking at what’s going on in AI sometimes makes me feel like the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, When he first visited the Trobriand Islands of then British New Guinea about a century ago, he became fascinated by the magic words that the islanders used and the actions they were believed to perform. Visiting the land of …
AI safety: It’s everywhere but what is it?
May 24, 2024
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 …
From contamination to collapse: On the trail of a new AI metaphor
April 19, 2024
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 …
Hunting for AI metaphors
April 12, 2024
Thousands of articles and blog posts have been written about generative AI, especially ChatGPT. Some or these, especially blog posts, are about metaphors. As a metaphor hunter (see image!) I feel a bit ashamed that I haven’t done much on metaphor and AI. A little bit yes; for example, on what metaphors ChatGPT uses about …
Responsible AI to the max: Meet Goody-2
February 10, 2024
This is not a real blog post. I just needed to mark the advent of a thought-provoking and funny, yes funny, AI, namely Goody-2 (and my brain always adds ‘shoes’….). Finding Goody-2 A couple of days ago, I saw this tweet by Melanie Mitchell, a complexity scientist and expert on AI, which made me curious. …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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