Notes on Chapter 1 of Agüera y Arcas's What Is Intelligence?, where the question of what counts as alive dissolves into a question about where we choose to draw the frame. The first entry on this book covered symbiogenesis and the argument that evolution's big jumps come from… read → 10 min

A few days after writing up the IHEMI evening in the previous entry, I was back around a table with Margaux Pelen and Marine Buclon-Ducasse for the fifth Tandem dinner. The theme was harder to hold than it looks: AI and intimacy. Twelve voices around the table. What follows… read → 26 minLONG READ

I had just grabbed a coffee with Margaux Pelen and Marine Buclon-Ducasse, a quick catchup after a small break of thirteen years. We talked about what AI is actually doing to our lives and to society. About the importance of experiencing it first hand, emotionally and… read → 17 minLONG READ

Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail reads like a thousand-year dataset for anyone building institutions around transformative technology. The argument is monocausal by design, and that's both its power and its limit: the prosperity of a nation is a product of its political… read → 9 min

Adrien Bilal, France's best young economist of 2026, swapped one variable in the standard climate damage model. The estimated cost of warming jumped from 1-3% to over 20% of global GDP per degree. In 2018, William Nordhaus received the Nobel Prize for showing that 1°C of warming… read → 10 min

Notes on Chapter 1 of Agüera y Arcas's What Is Intelligence?, where von Neumann reverse-engineers biology from pure mathematics, and Dawkins turns out to have told only half the story. I am currently finishing Chapter 1 of Blaise Agüera y Arcas's What Is Intelligence? (MIT Press… read → 8 min

The world has reached peak child. AI and robotics are maturing fast enough to help care for ageing societies. China and the US are building. Europe, the continent that needs it most, is barely in the race. There are roughly two billion children under fifteen on Earth. According… read → 11 min

A new benchmark of 600+ model configurations reveals that biological foundation models do improve perturbation predictions, but experimental variability sets a hard ceiling. What this means for techbio investment. Foundation models (FMs) have transformed natural language… read → 12 min

Dylan Patel maps the three hard constraints on AI compute, and the picture is worse than the capex numbers suggest. The standard framework for AI capacity lists four drivers: energy, compute, data, models. "Compute" is the one everyone mentions and few people unpack. What does… read → 10 min

I came across a paper today that I haven't been able to put down (visual summary here). Published just a few weeks ago, Shaw and Nave from Wharton have extended Kahneman's dual-process theory to include AI as a third cognitive system, and the empirical results are unsettling in… read → 3 min

A few weeks ago I was invited to one of Bestioles' "Dîners Confidentiels", intimate evenings the foundation organizes to bring together people genuinely engaged with animal welfare and environmental questions. The dinner was organized by Méliane Rocher and Magdaleine Pertusier… read → 8 min

Yesterday evening I attended the 39th Prix Turgot at the Centre Pierre Mendès France in Bercy, France's annual rendez-vous for the best books in financial and economic writing, one I always look forward to. The Grand Prix went to Dominique Foray for Innovations : une économie… read → 16 minLONG READ

The field crossed a critical threshold in June 2025: the first peer-reviewed Phase IIa results for a molecule where both target and compound were discovered entirely by generative AI. Insilico Medicine's rentosertib, a TNIK inhibitor for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, showed… read → 3 min

The crop protection market is undergoing a compulsory transformation. On one side, EU regulations increasingly cap active ingredient volumes per hectare (Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009), and farmers legally cannot apply more, even if crops need it. On the other, the bioactive… read → 1 min

The state of play: where tech, AI, and capital stand right now. I'm sharing our full LP presentation covering AI and the VC market in S2 2025. We believe in open-sourcing knowledge: producing rigorous data and insights is how you strengthen a tech ecosystem. It builds shared… read → 6 min

Jeff Dean's talk at Stanford isn't a triumphant history of breakthroughs but something more instructive: a confession that modern AI emerged from decisions that were, by his own admission, "completely mathematically wrong." The distributed training system they built, DistBelief,… read → 14 min

Vishal Misra, a Columbia CS professor who accidentally invented RAG while trying to fix a cricket statistics website, has developed the most rigorous formal models for understanding what LLMs can and cannot do. In a recent interview with Erik Torenberg and Martin Casado on the… read → 14 min

Y Combinator's latest batch told a story that contradicts the dominant narrative in enterprise AI. The narrative says incumbents win because they have the data. The data says startups are winning because they have the speed. The gap between these two claims reveals a structural… read → 5 min

TL;DR Andrej Karpathy, who spent five years at Tesla watching Autopilot move from demo to partial deployment, applies this experience to AI timelines in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel. His core thesis challenges current orthodoxy: we're scaling the wrong thing. Current LLMs do… read → 13 min

Most founders treat early sales as a necessary evil before hiring "real" salespeople. Jen Abel, who has built and advised multiple B2B companies through zero-to-one (xGeneral Assembly, xTheMuse), says that's backwards. In her conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, she lays out a… read → 6 min

TL;DR: AI isn't progressing evenly. Jason Wei argues the real question isn't when it changes everything, but which kinds of tasks it conquers first, and why verification, not intelligence, defines the next frontier. A quant trader says ChatGPT can't do his job. An AI researcher… read → 9 min

A frequent critique of GenAI is that because it is probabilistic, it will inevitably make errors. The argument is often framed as disqualifying: if mistakes are guaranteed, how can these systems be trusted at scale? The objection has intuitive appeal, but it rests (i) on… read → 8 min

We are a tech generalist fund: we invest across categories, mostly in software. But we also deliberately invest in deep tech, especially in health tech (Raidium, OneBioScience, Dune), tech bio (Oria Bioscience, Generare), agtech (.omics, EPICS Biotechnology, etc.) and other… read → 6 min

This is my raw notes from reading this wonderful essay from Gurwinder. - Platforms commit a "heist of time" by accelerating our subjective sense of time. We then underestimate usage and fail to notice the loss. - Evidence and effect: the "30-minute ick factor": many users… read → 3 min