Laurent F.

Data and AI. Interpretative dancing of quantum field theory is my main hobby. Opinions are my own.

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@remilouf Same.

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@alexeixbt Didn’t see anything, I was tokenmaxxing the whole time @raoufcode

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

I think I deserve a prize for most creative and enjoyable tokenmaxxing @AnthropicAI

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Martin Scorsese joins AI filmmaking firm Black Forest Labs as an adviser.

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@altryne @gdb +1

[Pliny the Liberator 🐉󠅫󠄼󠄿󠅆󠄵󠄐󠅀󠄼󠄹󠄾󠅉󠅭 @elder_plinius]

watch how fast these labs launch their “unsafe” models when a competitor starts beating their benchmarks

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@amasad @matei_zaharia @raoufcode and I did a demo at Databricks London HQ of Replit x Databricks development and deployment last Wednesday. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you are interested.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is Mount Fuji in Japan right now

[John T Davies 🇪🇺 @jtdavies]

The @aiDotEngineer after-after-after party
@WolframRvnwlf @altryne @hellheff @liamcbride @raoufcode & @Prince_Canuma

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@nikitabase @neondatabase @databricks I just realized I switched every time you switched 🤣

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@nikitabase Lakebase/Neon is an amazing product 💪🏻

[Nikita | Scaling Postgres @nikitabase]

Remember the days when you had to guess how much storage your database needed, and it would just break if you used too much.

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

Grothendieck once said he didn’t attack problems head-on; instead, he’d ‘build a new house’ so vast that the problem became just a small room inside. That’s vision. LLMs, by contrast, can only rearrange the furniture in whatever house already exists. I believe @edfrenkel and @ericweinstein are pushing for higher standards than remodeling!

[Edward Frenkel @edfrenkel]

This is an unwise statement that can only make people confused about what LLMs can or cannot do. Let me tell you something: Math is NOT about solving this kind of ad hoc optimization problems. Yeah, by scraping available data and then clustering it, LLMs can sometimes solve some very minor math problems. It's an achievement, and I applaud you for that. But let's be honest: this is NOT the REAL Math. Not by 10,000 miles.

REAL Math is about concepts and ideas - things like "schemes" introduced by the great Alexander Grothendieck, who revolutionized algebraic geometry; the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem; or the Langlands Program, tying together Number Theory, Analysis, Geometry, and Quantum Physics. That's the REAL Math. Can LLMs do that? Of course not.

So, please, STOP confusing people - especially, given the atrocious state of our math education.

LLMs give us great tools, which I appreciate very much. Useful stuff! Go ahead and use them AS TOOLS (just as we use calculators to crunch numbers or cameras to render portraits and landscapes), an enhancement of human abilities, and STOP pretending that LLMs are somehow capable of replicating everything that human beings can do.

In this one area, mathematics, LLMs are no match to human mathematicians. Period. Not to mention many other areas.

Calling on my friend @ericweinstein and @GaryMarcus, who has been one of the few sane expert voices on these matters lately. 🙏

h/t @hellheff

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@ericweinstein Lunch, full-disclosure: I’m French

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@DrJimFan John von Neumann would disagree with "Data has historucally been seen as separate from compute". Maybe we just forgot. Maybe new facts/papers have more in common with old books then what we first envisioned.

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@jason_kint Hi Jason, it’s a somewhat well known document for experts. It might be largely unknown from the general public

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@Cobratate 🧞‍♂️

[Laurent F. @hellheff]

@shay_I_am Hahahahaha 🤣