Philippe Buschini Posts

**November 2022.** One button. Five days. One million users.

ChatGPT has just been born, and nobody yet knows that the world will never quite be the same again. What took Facebook 10 months, Netflix 3 and a half years, happened in less than a week.

Today, you talk to it like you’d ask for the time. 400 million people do it every week. The machine has entered our thoughts. Discreetly. Massively.

But here’s the most troubling part: this revolution rests on a discovery only eight years old. A seemingly innocuous paper. An almost bureaucratic title: _”Attention Is All You Need”_.

Its authors probably didn’t know they had just rewritten history.

**How did a technology colonize our lives in so little time? How can a machine write like Hemingway, code like a senior developer, and sometimes… understand us better than we understand ourselves?**

In this five-part series, I’m taking you on a journey to the heart of this silent revolution. No jargon. No mystification. Just clarity.

Because understanding AI is no longer a luxury.
It’s become a civic necessity.

CERISE & ADA

For years, AI giants have been playing the same lottery: stack more and more layers, pump in more and more computing power, hope it holds. Sometimes, after months of training and millions of dollars spent, everything would collapse. Without warning.

The problem? Nobody really knew why.

Then DeepSeek pulled an old algorithm from 1967 out of the archives, forgotten in some dusty math paper. Something that had nothing to do with AI originally. Just matrices and geometry. And with that, they succeeded where others were failing.

This isn’t just a technical improvement. It’s a complete philosophical shift. Proof that you can do better with less, that intelligence isn’t just about size, but about architecture.

The story of how a 60-year-old algorithm just reshuffled the deck in the AI race.

OPINION

An orchestra without a conductor is organized chaos. Each musician plays in tune, yet together, things begin to drift. AI works the same way. It produces striking text while being able to slip at any sentence, all with the same confident tone. For a long time, we believed there were only two options: speak to it better (prompt engineering) or reprogram it (fine-tuning). But there is a third path, more subtle. A way of whispering directly into its internal states, while it is thinking.

This is called steering.
And it changes everything, not only our relationship with AI.
Our relationship with ourselves as well.

OPINION

Have you ever spent twenty minutes scrolling, reading, watching… then closed LinkedIn with a strange feeling, the sense of having consumed a lot without really learning anything?

This is not a lack of curiosity or discipline. It is the effect of a new information environment where AI produces smooth, reassuring, instantly consumable content, yet often poor in substance. This is what we call AI slop, intellectual food that satisfies in the moment, without ever nourishing thought.

OPINION

We spend our time hunting down mistakes as if they were the enemy of progress. Yet without them, no knowledge would ever emerge, no learning would ever truly stand. Error is the quiet engine of all intelligence.

The problem begins when we confuse it with deception, and when we project onto our machines the fantasy of a perfection we have never managed to reach ourselves. Without awareness of our own biases, artificial intelligence can only become a magnifying mirror of our blind spots.

This article invites a step aside, not to condemn technology, but to recall one simple and demanding truth: it is not the machine that must become perfect, it is our gaze on our own limits that must become clearer.

OPINION