Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
The technology media tends to focus on the latest foundation models for AI, products like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek etc. These are general-purpose models that can be adapted to specialist uses. What gets less attention in the press is that a whole industry of such specialist tools has sprung up to take advantage of the…
The Black Mirror TV series explored dystopian futures, and one of its recurring themes was the idea of a digital life after death. This was the theme of no less than three episodes: Be Right Back (2013), San Junipero (2016) and Eulogy (2025). As often with science fiction, life is not far behind, and there…
The idea of a “digital twin”, a virtual replica of a physical object, is not a new one. In the 1960s NASA built computer simulations of spacecraft for the Apollo missions. The idea was that the telemetry from real-world sensors on the Apollo craft would be fed into the simulator, in order to see what…
What if a cardboard sign could cause a self-driving car to crash—or force a drone to land immediately? Recent research shows that misleading text placed in a robot’s visual field can have potentially dangerous real-world consequences. One of the more established use cases for AI has been in robotics, with the first AI-driven robot, called…
For the last three years or so, generative AI, powered by large language models (LLMs) have been pushed by vendors and consultants as the ultimate automation tool. Previous waves of AI have struggled to make a lasting impact outside of niche applications, as IBM found out with its Watson AI tool. A much-publicised flagship Watson…
The growth of interest in AI has been a global phenomenon over the last three years. However, while large language model (LLM) adoption has been rapid, there is an open question as to whether the industry’s pricing model is sustainable. Is current LLM pricing a steady state business model or a temporary subsidy? Consider the…
In June 2025, Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux and Git, was asked about “vibe coding”, where non-programmers use large language models to write code. He memorably described it as “Very Inefficient But Entertaining”. However, the world of AI is far from static, and the release of Claude Opus 4.5 in November 2025 seems to…
In December 2025 Snowflake Ventures made a strategic (though undisclosed in monetary value) investment in data management vendor Ataccama. This was a more interesting event than just a regular financing round for a software vendor, as it has implications for the broader data quality industry. There have been issues with data quality ever since the…
It is now just over three years since ChatGPT was launched publicly by OpenAI, and ignited a wave of interest in AI and huge investment in companies providing AI products and services. OpenAI itself has been publicly pondering a 2026 IPO at a potential valuation of $750 billion or more. NVIDIA, which makes the specialist…
If you have been reading this blog for some time, then you may recall the curious story of Anthropic’s AI Claudius, an early experiment into agentic AI. Anthropic ran a test of their Claude AI, allowing it to run a little business, specifically their office vending machine. Claudius, as the agent was named, was given…