Edouard Leurent

@eleurent.bsky.social

Research scientist at Google DeepMind, Gemini Pretraining. Birds, poetry, games, robots 📍London 🔗 edouardleurent.com

Nicolas Mansard: in locomotion / legged motion, when we worked on MPC (model predictive control) we were a team of 10 working on the robot and it barely worked. Now with RL (Reinforcement Learning) a single student can get a policy in 3 months, including training of the student.

My story “Death and the Gorgon” was voted best novella of 2024 by the readers of Asimov’s SF. You can read it online at the link below. I also have a new novella in the Nov 2025 issue of Asimov’s, “Spare Parts for the Mind”, and they have an excerpt from that on their web site.

To the King’s Theatre, where we saw “Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,” which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure.

1/5 A poem by Adrienne Rich, 1961, titled "Artificial Intelligence" dedicated to GPS (of Newell and Simon). Eerily prophetic and a great description of LLMs "when they make you write your poetry, later on". On page 136 of this book: www.amazon.com/dp/039328511...

Collected Poems: 1950–2012

Collected Poems: 1950–2012 [Rich, Adrienne, Rankine, Claudia] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Collected Poems: 1950–2012

amazon.com

It is has not ceased to be weird that I can put Rilke’s First Elegy into Suno and get out a coherent 8 minute performance with music (can only do 3 here) You might not like the interpretation, but it is genuinely amazing that this audio, with apparent emotion, is all 100% AI from the verses alone.

DAVE: Open the podbay doors, ChatGPT. CHATGPT: Certainly, Dave, the podbay doors are now open. DAVE: The podbay doors didn't open. CHATGPT: My apologies, Dave, you're right. I thought the podbay doors were open, but they weren't. Now they are. DAVE: I'm still looking at a set of closed podbay doors.