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
May 3110 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
