What Connect Four and a Failed Farming Experiment Taught Me About Building Organisations That Improve Themselves
A few weeks ago, on a Saturday morning, I went down a rabbit hole (again). I was watching a training loop crawl across my MacBook, fifteen iterations into teaching a neural network to play Connect Four from scratch. No rules of thumb. No opening book. No human games. Just self-play: the network against itself, again and again, with an arena gate that only promotes a new model if it beats the old one. This is the first proper experiment in my ‘Public Experiment’ blog series on
2 hours ago10 min read
When the pie grows but the slice shrinks: what black cabs and handloom weavers know that AI evangelists don't
It's Tuesday evening in Marylebone. I'm in the back of a black cab. The driver is sixty-something, second-generation cabbie, did the Knowledge in 1987. He's telling me he now drives twelve-hour shifts to clear what eight hours used to bring him a decade ago. "My boy is driving an Uber now. Pays the same." He looks at me in the mirror. "Maybe less, after the rent on the car." I give him a tip and walk the last couple of minutes home thinking about handloom weavers. The promise
May 110 min read
The Silicon Ceiling: Why AI's Biggest Bottleneck Isn't Intelligence - It's Atoms
Saturday morning, packing for another trip to Singapore, halfway through a three-hour interview between Dwarkesh Patel and Dylan Patel (I know, I lead an exciting life) - founder of SemiAnalysis and arguably the most cited analyst in AI infrastructure - and I realise I've paused the video four times to type notes and WhatsApp friends. Not because I understand all the detail of semiconductor manufacturing. I absolutely do not. But because the numbers Dylan was dropping made me
Mar 148 min read
Why Shallow AGI Will Beat You at Everything and Not Truly Understand: A Professional's Guide to Working With Brilliant Imposters
It's 9:12 AM on a Wednesday in 2027. I'm stress-testing a scenario model I've been building, when the AI finishes something in forty seconds that would have taken my team a full sprint. The output is better than what we'd have produced. More thorough. Better structured. And when I push it on a specific regulatory edge case that requires real-world judgement about how a regulator actually behaves in practice, it gives me an answer that is technically correct, impressively argu
Feb 225 min read
Nobody Has a Map: What Matt Shumer's 80 Million Readers Still Need to Hear About AI
Wednesday morning. I'm at my desk when my I check my phone and it shows the fourth forwarded link in two hours. "Have you seen this?" Each message points to the same place: Matt Shumer's "Something Big Is Happening" post on X. By lunchtime it had 20 million views. By the end of the week, 50 million. At the time of writing, 80 million. Friends who normally send me articles about resilience risk or cat videos were sending me this instead, each asking some version of the same qu
Feb 156 min read
My AI Predictions Expired Before the Ink Dried: Why Even Exponential Thinking Isn't Fast Enough
It’s Saturday before I fly to India on a work trip and I'm reviewing a predictions piece I published on LinkedIn just over four weeks ago. Ten bold forecasts for AI in 2026, written in the spirit of Ray Kurzweil's exponential optimism. I'd even felt a little bit pleased with myself writing them as they were a bit… aggressive, even. The kind of piece that makes people say 'that's a stretch.' And as I sit here getting ready to pack my suitcase, I am reflecting on the fact that
Feb 17 min read
The Tax on Intelligence: Why the UK Is Paying Four Times More to Think
Last week I sat on a panel on AI for a private equity firm. There were some great insights around the state of AI in the wild from the CEOs, founders and other panellists in the sessions I managed to see and in the conversations over drinks afterwards. One of the topics that discussions increasingly turned to is the energy premium we are paying in the UK and what that means about the cost of keeping our data centre lights on. The Stakes Most People Miss This blog is about why
Jan 268 min read
