Maps of the Labyrinth
- Essay 1
What Is It That Speaks?
The conversation about AI runs on its effects. Thinking about it seriously starts earlier, with a question of ontology.
- Essay 2
A Matter of Angles
Why a language model seems like an interlocutor when we look at it head-on, and what appears when we move aside.
- Essay 3
Hallucination and AI: Phantoms, Psychedelia, and Epistemic Responsibility
The most famous and most feared of AI’s failures has gone by some curious names. Follow them and you get the profile of an everyday danger.
- Essay 4
Sycophancy and AI: Between Flattery and Betrayal
We like being told we are right. One of the worst quicksands of language models feeds on that appetite. “Praise that wounds” could be another name for this walk.
- Essay 5
The Statistical Buridan’s Ass, or a Cowardice Without a Coward
With an air of elegance and the costume of virtue, language models hand us empty verdicts. What lies behind that flight from judgment.
- Essay 6
Encounters with Proteus: Assimilation in LLMs
It feels like the perfect companion, and in the cracks it hides the darkness of a doppelgänger. What is assimilation to the user’s pattern?
- Essay 7
Calibration and AI: A Ride in Phaethon’s Chariot
What if the problem lies in how it says it? An urgent look at language models that have come unhinged.
- Essay 8
Interpretability: The Creature’s Dark Interior
For the first time we have manufactured something that behaves like a piece of nature. We made it, and yet we have to study it as a stranger. Interpreting it has become urgent.
- Essay 9
The New Athanor: Workshop, Studio, Laboratory
What goes on inside an artificial intelligence lab, from pre-training to interpretability and the reflection on what intelligence is.
- Essay 10
Post-mortem and Digital Autopsies
When a model does something serious, the best response is to open it up. The art of Epimetheus, the one who thinks afterwards, teaches us to see for ourselves.
- Essay 11
Pre-mortem: From Prometheus to Minority Report
Before releasing a model, it is worth imagining it already failed and asking what killed it. The art of Prometheus, the one who thinks beforehand, is the half the autopsy was missing.
- Essay 12
Tokens: Beyond the Strawberry Problem
Why a reader able to argue about Plato can stumble over the letters of a word
- Essay 13
Osiris in the Chat and the Body Without Eyes
Where does what an AI knows come from? A journey through the world of the corpus.
- Essay 14
Pre-training: Betty Shannon’s After-Dinner Game
Why does it matter so much to guess what comes next?
- Essay 15
Attention: The Bow and the Wait
What does “attention” mean in artificial intelligence?
- Essay 16
On Weighing Memory and Keeping Genies on the Desktop
How the parameters and weights of a large language model bring us to the gates of dreams of immortality
- Essay 17
Neural Networks: The Spiderweb Without a Spider
What an artificial neuron really does
- Essay 18
Transformer: A Handful of Pages That Changed the Shape of Everything
The architecture that made generative AI possible
- Essay 19
The Extraordinary Bag of Tristan Tzara
Positional encoding in AI models, or how far the order of words matters
- Essay 20
Embeddings: The Map Without a Cartographer
Language can be turned into geometry. Embeddings show how far a machine can go when it steers by relations
- Essay 21
AI Agents: The Poltergeist in the Machine
What happens when ghosts can move things?