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
4 days 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
