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…
In recent years, there has been much speculation about the possibility of the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI). This is an AI that would match or exceed human intelligence in most or all tasks. Such an AI would reason, learn, remember, innovate and adapt to new environments without the need for training or retraining.…
Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said that “no one understands quantum mechanics”, despite his having delivered a famous set of lectures on the subject. Despite this drawback, many companies, such as Google, IBM and others, are now building small, early working models of quantum computers, which promise to solve certain classes of mathematical problems drastically faster…
The world of technology moves rapidly, and it is hard to build a sustainable competitive advantage. Just ask Blackberry (business smartphones), Nokia (mobile phones), Yahoo (search), AOL (email and chat), MySpace (social network) and Kodak (film). Technology companies seek to build a “moat”, a durable competitive advantage that is hard to copy. Such a moat…
We usually think of AI running on web-connected servers in the cloud somewhere, but what about AI running on a stand-alone device, not connected to the internet? There are actually more examples of this than you may realise. To start with, security cameras detect motion or objects locally without sending data to the cloud. Self-driving…
One mantra regarding large language models (LLMs) is that bigger is better. Parameters are the learned weights of a model, while tokens represent the pieces of text used to train it. The more training tokens an LLM sees, the more fluent the answers it produces. This assumption that bigger is better is what has driven…
Imagine giving a robot a multiple-choice exam, but then realising it already knows all the answers. When a new version of an AI model is released by a major vendor like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, it usually comes with a series of statements about how well the model performs on benchmark tests. These benchmarks may…
The web browsing market has been relatively stable for some years, with Google Chrome holding 72% market share in 2025, ahead of Apple’s Safari at 12%. These are followed by Microsoft Edge, Firefox and Opera. Recently, the AI chatbot vendors have decided to muscle in on this market, and existing incumbents have added AI features…
Large language models (LLMs) have developed significantly since ChatGPT burst onto the public scene in late 2022, built on the GPT-3 model. There have been increases in scale, with GPT-4 being several times larger than GPT-3 in terms of the numbers of parameters. Context windows increased from a few thousand tokens to over a million.…