Crafting artificially intelligent minds.
A team can get faster, flatter, and happier while quietly losing the ability to decide how it works. Here are some notes on how to tell, and what to do about it. Watch a team adopt AI tooling and you will see something that looks like a win. Cycle time drops. The hierarchy flattens, because the junior person and the senior person now ship work that is harder to tell apart. Autonomy scores go up.…
Foundation models are eating software from both ends. Here are some notes on where the value actually lives, and how to build something that lasts. Nearly $1 trillion was wiped from software and services stocks in a matter of weeks. FactSet dropped from a $20B peak to under $8B. Thomson Reuters shed almost half its market cap in a year. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are verticalizing fast. They…
Like most, I feel like I'm constantly struggling to keep up with the pace of AI development these days. Not just in the technological sense, but mainly trying to make sense of the paradigm shifts it induces. As a founder, it's ever more important to understand how this impacts how we build, ship and sell products. The playbook feels like it's constantly shifting, so I wanted to summarize some of…
There are a lot of strange places on the internet. Forums that required blood oaths to join. Discord servers with lore docs longer than Infinite Jest . Subreddits dedicated to things I cannot unsee and will not name. But usually, the captcha tries to keep the robots out, not the other way around. On Moltbook, the robots are the ones keeps us out: "Humans welcome to observe." That's the actual…
Even in warehouses bristling with sensors and automation, a curious gap persists: operators often struggle to explain why throughput fluctuates from day to day. It's not a measurement problem: the data is there, the dashboards are green. Yet output drifts in ways that resist clean explanation, a pattern that points to something fundamental about the systems we've built. One way to make sense of…
Predictions are notoriously a fool's errand. As Rod Brooks puts it in his own yearly predictions , we are all susceptible to FOBAWTPALSL : Fear Of Being A Wimpy Techno-Pessimist And Looking Stupid Later these days. This fear, combined with its cousin FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), drives herd behavior in establishing the zeitgeist on almost any technology topic. Now, I'm no Rodney Brooks, so I won't…
Ask ChatGPT to write a metaphor about time. Then ask Claude. Then Gemini. You're consulting different oracles, built by rival companies with different philosophies, trained on different data. Surely you'd get meaningfully different answers? Here's what actually happens: time is a river. Time is a river. Time is a river, flowing endlessly. Time is a weaver, threading moments into tapestry. Time is…
Silicon Valley doesn't just shape the world, it rules it. The tech giants that call it home have amassed extraordinary influence over political and social structures, with decisions that ripple far beyond U.S. borders. This dominance turned domination is especially pronounced in AI, one of the critical domains of technological leadership of the 21st century. In a recent interview, Jensen Huang,…
In the opening act of The Social Network , Eduardo Saverin stands at a dorm room window, marker in hand, scrawling a mathematical formula across the glass. The Elo rating system, originally designed for chess, would become the engine behind Facemash, Mark Zuckerberg's proto-Facebook experiment in rating the "hotness" of female Harvard students. "Give each girl a base rating of 1400 1400 1400 . At…
AI systems are suddenly capable of tasks they consistently failed at months ago. The secret isn't just about bigger models or more computing power. Behind the latest breakthroughs is a quiet revolution: companies have stopped training AI and started teaching it. For years, the recipe for AI seemed simple: build bigger neural networks, feed them vast oceans of text from the internet, and let them…
p]:m-0">🚧 Note: This article is under construction. Post-training is all the rage. Are we going from training to teaching? What does a curriculum look like for LLMs? Let's find out. For most of the deep learning era, the core recipe for building intelligent models has been relatively straightforward: take a transformer, scale up the parameters, feed it vast amounts of text, predict the next token…
This article was originally published on the Ogment.ai blog . Being in the trenches of AI-first infrastructure, I've been watching Model Context Protocol (MCP) evolve from niche curiosity to a mainstream standard. For builders like us, MCP isn't just a theory, it's a potential backbone that would let anyone expose product APIs and data as plug-and-play tools inside agents like ChatGPT or Claude.…
Would you trust a robot with no sensors? Then why are we building AI agents that way? In robotics, we obsess over sensors. We use cameras for vision, lidar for depth, IMUs for motion, force sensors for manipulation. Each one is painstakingly selected, calibrated, and fused into a representation of the world — the robot's working reality. But for AI agents , we often treat the data pipeline as an…
After nearly three years building Claryo from conversations on commutes with Mohamed into a truly awesome AI product, I've decided the time is right for me to step away and begin a new chapter. Claryo is in great hands. I'm confident our team will keep pushing the mission forward, and I'm excited to cheer them on from the sidelines. It's been a deeply formative experience: building with brilliant…
Published on the blog Artifices Intelligents of Le Temps newspaper. Available here . A few months ago, the American company OpenAI ignited a firestorm in the Machine Learning community. The announcement of the impressive results of an automatic text generator was accompanied by the decision not to publicly release the model, fearing its potential malicious use. This successful research directly…
In a philosophical sense, the creative lineage of a work generated by artificial intelligence is difficult to define. This notion is equally complex in the legal framework. Certain specificities of machine learning algorithms raise new questions about the protection of the intellectual property they represent and the productions these models generate. Present even in the Universal Declaration of…
At the beginning of November, Christie's auctioned off a piece generated by an artificial intelligence algorithm. Sold for over 480,000 CHF, the Portrait of Edmond Bellamy sparked debates across the art world and the research community. Some applaud the audacity of the creators, proclaiming the dawn of a new era in the art market. Others see it as a marketing stunt, inflated by technical…
The video opens with a fade-in, a summer hit, already played far too many times, tolls the bell. The latest robot from Boston Dynamics begins an extraordinary dance of dexterity, perfectly synchronized to the rhythm of the track with 3.2 billion views: Uptown Funk, by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars. Caught between fascination and astonishment, the contrast between the light-hearted music and the…
Introduction In this series of posts, I will be writing up about some work done in the context of a semester project counting for my degree from EPFL . This is meant more as a record than an in-depth tutorial, but don't hesitate to drop me a line if you would like to see more details. This work was done under supervision by Sylvain Calinon , senior researcher in the Robot Learning & Interaction…
Motivation: Controlling robots is hard. Introduction In this series of posts, I will be writing up about some work done in the context of a semester project counting for my degree from EPFL . This is meant more as a record than an in-depth tutorial, but don't hesitate to drop me a line if you would like to see more details. This work was done under supervision by Sylvain Calinon , senior…
This work was done in the context of the Data Jam Days at EPFL ( 24-25 Nov 2017 ). Intro The Swiss confederation provides a large amount of data spanning virtually every aspect of the political process in Switzerland. With a convenient API to query the proceedings of committees, councillors, parties, logs of voting sessions ... From this massive resource we decided to study voting patterns in the…
A primer on style transfer What makes Starry Night look like a van Gogh painting ? Is it the colours ? Is the brush stroke ? Is it the subject ? Somehow when we see this painting we associate its style to its author. If the style of the painting can be thought of as an independent component from the subject it represents, would it be possible to apply the style of Starry Night to another painting…
An example of approximative vulgarization. So a few days ago, I was scrolling Facebook and saw an article by a popular scientific vulgarization page, titled Scientists Discover That Our Brains Can Process the World in 11 Dimensions. 1 Obviously, this sounded a bit clickbaity, but I was revising for a computational neuroscience class and the paper they mentioned was written at my University, EPFL…