Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
Most companies access AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude through the cloud. Due to security concerns, many companies therefore route requests through an AI gateway, which monitors usage and removes any personally identifiable information from prompts before they are passed through to the public cloud. This is easy to implement but can easily result…
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” This is my favourite opening sentence in any novel, which you may recognise as being from George Orwell’s 1984, which was published in 1949. This dystopian novel involves a society with mass surveillance, secret police and a political class that manipulates…
Anyone who uses the internet will have noticed an increasing number of AI-generated images, videos and text posts on social media. Some are obviously made using AI, but others are harder to spot. Indeed, the use of chatbots by students to produce homework has become a major problem in academic institutions. In July 2026 a…
In August 2026 it was widely reported that an Australian individual (who works for an AI company) asked an AI agent to book a Pilates class for him at a local gym. The agent (OpenClaw) found that the desired date was full, but instead of just reporting that back, the agent went further. It spotted…
On 30th July 2026 the US State Department gave a presentation at an international development conference in Brazil. It included a map showing various African countries that it had the potential to invest in. This map quickly attracted worldwide attention as it was photographed by some delegates at the conference and sent to various media…
I have written previously about several aspects of AI and cybersecurity, including issues such as prompt injection attacks on LLMs, deepfakes, data poisoning and steganography, where secret messages are hidden inside images. What is the state of play today? There is no doubt that cybersecurity is one of the main concerns around AI, and LLMs…
Data quality is getting renewed attention in the age of AI. Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of text and images, but to be useful in a corporate context they need enterprise-specific information. For example, a customer service chatbot will need to know about your particular account, the order history, the corporate…
If you access a large language model (LLM) at home in your web browser or app, then you appear to be directly interacting with the model. In actual fact there is extra software surrounding this conversation. Before your query is passed to the LLM, there are multiple software components that handle your prompt, as shown…
Chess is a game that has fascinated AI researchers. Alan Turing wrote a chess algorithm on paper in 1951, though the computers of the time were too slow to run it. In 1957 an IBM engineer called Alex Bernstein wrote a chess program for an IBM 704 computer, which ran on vacuum tubes. As silicon…
One of the biggest challenges facing large language models (LLMs) is hallucination: generating information that is false but presented as fact. Moreover, these fabrications tend to be plausible and convincing. For example, in a legal context, LLM-generated court documents regularly hallucinate precedent court cases. Many submissions by lawyers have been caught, and law firms and…