This essay is heavily influenced by James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. To the question “what is 2 + 3” a French primary school pupil replied: “3 + 2, since addition is commutative”. He did not know wh…
I find myself constantly wandering in bookshops looking for new poems and poets, often without any success. I’ve recently defended my PhD, which is on AI for formal mathematics. Now I’m a full-time researcher at Mistral AI, working on reaso…
I find myself constantly wandering in bookshops looking for new poems and poets, often without any success. “Why can’t I find more poems like Telemachus?” Then a friend’s comparison between Dostoevsky and Nabokov struck me: The latter looks…
I’ve recently defended my PhD, which is on AI for formal mathematics. Now I’m a full-time researcher at Mistral AI, working on reasoning. A significant shift in my work is that now I spend my working hours on informal reasoning rather than
This is my first NeurIPS - last year I had three papers and no visa. The general atmosphere is contagious: the echo chamber of AI is indeed comfortable and exciting. When so many people get together to have low-latency conversations that pl…