Commentary

I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in a debate raising money for Farset Labs, a cause obviously close to my cold cynical heart. Will GenAI Revolutionise Our Lives For The Good In The Next 5 Years is top tier troll-bait from Garth and Art, and I’m very grateful to have shared the stage with the 5 other speakers. Even the lanky english one. I was particularly impressed by my teammates in their very human-led approach to this question (although everyone was great!) ...

Note: The continuing adventures of ‘a dozen people asked what I thought about a new AI model in work so I put them together and republished it a few months later when I got a quiet weekend’… So, Deepseek stripped billions from the market on Monday. Do we care? My 2c is that this is a fantastic series of innovations on the core design of LLMs, and based on those innovations, I wouldn’t be surprised if the training costs quoted as being in the mid-to-high-single-digit-millions-of-dollars are around the right order of magnitude for this (assuming you already had the team expertise of a PhD fueled quant-hedge fund in house and didn’t pay them SV salaries). ...

Is LLM Smarter than a 12 year old? Had a few people ask about the o1 models; at work we’ve requested preview access from Microsoft to get them added to our internal LLM Gateway, so we’ll just wait and see, but there’s been some interesting discourse on it so far. My 2c is that this is OpenAI trying to take the chain-of-thought (aka ’talking to yourself’) in house rather than people doing the intermediate steps themselves. (That means, instead of just running the token prediction, it’s a repeated conversation with itself, with OpenAI providing the ‘inner monologe’ and just magically popping out the answer). This is fine in principal, and is how we do multi-shot RAG among other things, but the two(three) critical parts of this for me are ...

Much hay has been made that LLM’s can be infinitely trained on infinite data to do infinite jobs, in an approach generally described as ‘LLM Maximalism’. This post is a bit of a braindump to explain my thought process in how to practically use LLMs in a safe way in production/client facing environments, with a little bit of a discussion as to where I see the current blockers to this in most organisations, and where organisations should be focusing investment to be able to meet these challenges without loosing their competitive edge/expertise. ...

Turns out that November 1963 was a pretty stupendous month all in all, in particular the couple of days (20-24) we’re currently wading through. C.S Lewis (Good Belfast Man) who was not only the beloved childrens author, but also an accomplished scholar, and one of the pioneers of the Science Fiction form, popped his clogs due to long term illness on Friday 22nd at around 2pm GMT aged 64 Aldous Huxley, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century and author of one of my favourite books (Brave New World) spun off his mortal coil at the age of 69 taking one more tab of LSD to lighten his passage at 5pm the same day ...

See Part 1 for an introduction to this series. Response to Part 1 Two things came out of my posting of Part 1; I was “strongly encouraged” to have a look at the evidence pack as well as the initial strategy document (unfortunately changing what was intended to be a 3-part break down into more like a 8 part). So I’ll plod on through the rest of the strategy as read and then go through the evidence pack and see what got lost in the wash. ...

Introduction to my Critique Last month DETI announced a Consultation on their (i.e. Arlenes) Strategy to make Northern Ireland “into one of the most innovative regions with the UK”. I’m known to rant and rave about the use of the word “innovation” at the best of times, so I’ll just put that attitude on the shelf and highlight a few of what I think are the “ok” points and the decidedly questionable points in the strategy. First off as a general comment that I’d otherwise repeat over and over again going through the draft, other than the words “Northern Ireland”, and excluding some of the case-studies, this could be an innovation strategy for any region in the world. The stated “Barriers to innovation” read like they’re straight out of a Business Studies textbook, and in general, the (lengthy) exposition around this ideal of “innovation” is little more than a 34 page definition of what DETI considers innovation. (It’s a loaded word and everyone is entitled to have an opinion on what it means. I guess we know DETI’s now at least). Speaking of repeating, this does repeat itself over and over again, just take my word for it here and I won’t raise it individually… ...

I’m leaving Northern Ireland, and I’m moving to Liverpool. Via Portsmouth. I have spoken with a few people about the situation I find myself in, and a few more people about my decision, but I want to get it all down somewhere. Where did this come from? The short answer is that a series of unexpected events mean that it makes sense to move my research. Recently, my PhD supervisor, Prof Alan Marshall, was offered a research Chairship at the University of Liverpool, which he gladly accepted. It’s a great move for him (Another Russell Group, one of the original ‘redbrick’ universities, etc etc), but that’s his life not mine so all it does is provide an option. (Disclosure: I also work with Alan on his spinout Wireless Security company, TOM Ltd) ...

I was digesting “The Design of Design” by Fred Brooks as a bit of holiday reading, which talks in great depth about the nature of technical and architectural design from a practical perspective, and it made me thinking about my own experience and the “future” of that experience. Blessing or curse, due to my inability to say no and (publically) boundless patience exploration of a range of areas, in technology, security, academia, business, and society; several people have made flippant, off the cuff comments about some form of predicted success, usually financial or technical. ...

UPDATE 7/3/13 : See Bottom So I was ranting at @Translink_NI earlier and they helpfully responded with their service complaint submission system This was my hopefully helpful response Why does the #26 service stop so rarely at the NISP when compared to the stops just 2 minutes down the road at the BMC? While this is a 2 minute bus journey (ok 5 if you could there, back and turning time…), it’s a 10 min walk. ...