Year: 2024
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
The genome as autoencoder: A new biological metaphor
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…
-
Large language models, meaning and maths
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
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…
-
Being all at sea
It’s summer, but it isn’t. It is intermittently grey and rainy and stormy, with a few days of sunshine in between. In another year without a summer, namely 1816, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or so the myth goes* …. If she could sit in the Villa Diodati in gloomy weather and write, why can’t I,…
-
Blueprints, postmen and a bit of metaphor archaeology
At the end of June, the NHS announced a new gene therapy for haemophilia B. Gene therapy replaces a faulty gene or adds a new gene to correct a mutation (genetic fault). People with haemophilia B lack the blood clotting protein factor IX and can bleed severely from even a slight injury. Some therefore need frequent…
-
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…
Making Science Public 