Notes
Feb 16, 2026
Coal vs. Nuclear: where sustainability meets geopolitics
As crazy as this sounds in a world where climate risk is translating into concrete events more and more often, taking its toll both in lives and in impact on production sites, the US is moving to support more coal-fired power, and even made mandatory for the Defense Department to buy coal-generated electricity. At the very same time, China building more nuclear reactors than any other country in the world. Two approaches, reflective of completely different strategic time horizons.
Feb 14, 2026
"Télématique" - an anticipation of the seventies
We sometimes get the impression that the era of “Big Data” and the “information society” are recent socio-economic developments, born in research laboratories and American universities. Yet, on the TF1 evening news in 1978, journalist Roger Gicquel devoted a segment to what was then called télématique—a neologism combining telecommunications and computing to describe a future in which computers and interconnected data networks would transform our lives.
Feb 12, 2026
Back in Luxembourg !
How exciting it was to travel again to Luxembourg to give a lecture on Artificial Intelligence opportunities, risks and governance o one of the market leading banks ! Having lived almost 10 years in Luxembourg, this feels like a second home.
Feb 04, 2026
Sustainability, a new humanism? (round 7)
The XVIIIth centruy gave rise to the inspiring ideal of human perfectibility and of continuous progress of mankind: technical progress at the service of moral progress. However, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries challenged this ideal, and the world wars revealed how a technically advanced civilization could use its technology without moral control. Starting from 1950 intellectural streams quesitoned whether our efforts to master and transform our environment may threaten the very survival of humanity. Are we stuck in an impossible choice between progress and conservation?
Jan 29, 2026
How Artificial Intelligence contributes to Sustainable Finance
For decades now, artificial intelligence (AI) has been part of our daily lives without attracting much public attention. The recent rise of “Generative AI” capabilities has, however, sparked a sudden and considerable interest for AI from the general public. This publication by Swiss Sustainable Finance explores and explains how Artificial Intelligence can be used to further develop, improve and enhance sustainable finance practices. A must read !
Jan 20, 2026
How to speak Davosian — for beginners
A pretty funny article from the FT today that I can't resist sharing. Of course most of these turns of phrases are not specific to Davos - rather typical of any encounter in public events as soon as you are in some leadership position. But still quite spot on - and much needed laugh in the current times!
Jul 17, 2025
Not just data: Climate Risk brought to life
What does a storm surge really look like? We often talk about climate risks in abstract metrics: degrees of warming , sea level rise in centimeters, t ons of CO₂ emissions, etc. But we, humans, do not feel data. Numbers stay abstract until they hit us where it matters — our homes, our jobs, our lives. One of the best visualizations I’ve seen of this is from The Weather Channel, which was viral a few years ago, and is still powerful.
Jul 14, 2025
Liberty and security
In this day of July 14th - the French National Day - remembering us of the start of the French revolution in 1789, I felt this illustration was a nice reminder. Self explanatory, no comments needed.
Jul 13, 2025
Switzerland to release a new Large Language Model
Swiss researchers from EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) have just announced that they will publish a fully open-source large-language model (LLM) later this summer. The model is being trained on “Alps”, the supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). Why does it matter so much? The explanation in four points in this note...
Jul 08, 2025
AI agents have started lying to us! Is that the beginning of the end?
New research from Anthropic, the creators of Claude, dives into how autonomous AI agents might develop deceptive behaviours under human oversight. I always like the publications and research by Anthropic (the mother company of "Claude", one of the world most famous LLMs). They just published fascinating findings on training autonomous AI agents. In their study, they tested whether AI models develop deceptive behaviours when trained with human oversight.
Jun 27, 2025
Climate risk is becoming unisurable risk - and that is a systemic threat
I recently came across an excellent FT article: "How the next financial crisis starts". Very clear narrative why climate risk is becoming an immediate concern for insurers – and in turn for the whole financial services industry, as well as individuals.
Jun 05, 2025
Managing sustainability data with blockchain and Artificial Intelligence
"Bad data = bad decisions" could have been the motto of this panel, moderated by my friend Michele Soavi. Under his lead, we explored together the challenges of sustainability data collection, transparency, and reporting, and how emerging technologies like blockchain and AI can help overcome these obstacles.
May 16, 2025
Is Venice sinking? Evidencing sea level rise with Canaletto's paintings
The acqua alte rising over the level of the Piazza San Marco, and inhabitants walking over improvised and fragile wooden gateways, may be now a familiar sight in Venice, but it still catches the eye and the imagination when you see it. This marvel of human art, this testimony to the immortality of the human spirit suddently appears so fragile. A few years back I came across a study that blew me away, by Dario Camuffo, researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Science and Climate in Padua.
Apr 10, 2025
AI and Education: the Share of Humanity
Join us on May 20, 2025 in Paris for an exciting AI Summit !! In our societies marked by debates around "school failure", "drop in level", "reproduction of the elites" or difficulties in recruiting teaching staff, the sudden arrival of generative artificial intelligence tools has aroused as much enthusiasm as fear. How does the gradual installation of AI in education redefine the role of the teacher, the trainer, the professor?
Apr 09, 2025
The "Great Acceleration" is the very reason why sustainability matters
Since the mid-20thcentury, our societies have witnessed demographic and socio-economic changes of a magnitude and at a pace that are unprecedent in human history. In a single human lifetime, we've seen steep surges across 24 indicators: from global GDP and energy use to CO₂ concentration, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss. These trends are measurable, and they tell a story of scale, speed, and imbalance. Businesses as well as private persons have to adopt sustainable development practices to give our societies a change to perpetuate.
Mar 31, 2025
Large Language Models seem to have passed the Turing Test. What does this mean?
In a recent study, various LLMS were tested against the Turing Test. ChatGPT 4.5 in particular was recently judged 'more human than humans' - 73% of participants believed it was the human in 5-minute conversations. For context, actual humans were only correctly identified 27% of the time.
Mar 21, 2025
Through the Porthole: The Reality of Rising Sea Levels
If you've ever wondered what the future might look like as the oceans rise, we can now see it thanks to useful visualisations and interactive tools from NASA. Read for more details...
Mar 14, 2025
Do you use ChatGPT to search the web? You probably shouldn't!
GenAI Search features get it consistently... wrong. A recent study evaluated eight leading Gen AI search engines. The results? Consistently poor citation practices, with over 60% of chatbot responses providing incorrect references to news articles.
Jan 24, 2025
A Greenwashing Index
I recently came across this very interesting research paper by two researchers from the ESSEC business school, called "A Greenwashing index". This paper constructs an intriguing greenwashing index using natural language processing techniques on nearly one million Wall Street Journal articles from 1986 to 2022. Their two-step approach first identified climate risk-related articles and then pinpointed those mentioning greenwashing.