What the Asilomar AI Principles are, and why they still matter
In the first week of January 2017, the most influential people working in artificial intelligence gathered at a small conference centre on the California coast. Asilomar is the kind of place that hosts academic retreats and yoga weekends. For three days that month, it hosted what may have been the most consequential meeting about AI […]
How gradient descent works, and why it sits underneath every modern AI system
The algorithm that powers every AI tool you have used this year is older than the personal computer, the internet and the mobile phone. It was first described by the French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy in 1847. It is called gradient descent. And once you understand it, a lot of the magic around large language models […]
Recursive self-improvement in AI, and why we should care
In October 2017, DeepMind published a paper that should have unsettled more people than it did. Their system, AlphaGo Zero, had learned the ancient game of Go from scratch. No human games as input. No opening theory. No strategic guidance. Just the rules. After three days of playing itself, it beat the version that had […]
Why a quiet appointed representative is now the FCA’s first question
An appointed representative tells its network principal, soon after onboarding, that it does not intend to carry out any regulated activity. The principal keeps the AR on the Financial Services Register for over a year, waiting for the contractual end date to roll around before terminating. The FCA has just confirmed, in print, that this […]
The human adviser in an AI mortgage market
NatWest’s decision to place home-buying guidance inside ChatGPT is a story with large implications. It shows how quickly the first conversation about a mortgage can move away from a branch, a broker website, or a phone call, and into a digital channel that feels immediate, conversational and cheap. As I know from experience, first conversations […]
Basel 3.1: The Regulation Coming Over the Hill
Somewhere in the small Swiss city of Basel, inside a circular tower overlooking the Rhine, a committee of central bankers has been quietly reshaping the rules of global finance for half a century. What they’ve decided is now about to land squarely on the UK lending market, and if you’re advising clients on mortgages, you […]
How conversational AI actually happened, told through the people who made it
When ChatGPT landed in November 2022 and a hundred million people signed up in two months, most of us had never heard of Ilya Sutskever. Eighteen months later, the same name was on the front page of the Financial Times because he had voted to fire Sam Altman at OpenAI. The board reversed itself within […]
Why the FCA just built a fake bank
Three weeks ago, the FCA was being hauled over the coals for handing a chunk of its most sensitive customer data to Palantir. The Guardian reported the regulator had agreed to pay the controversial US firm more than £30,000 a week to train an AI system on case intelligence files, fraud reports, consumer complaints, phone […]
The FCA Has Just Redrawn the Map for Mortgages. Most Brokers Haven’t Noticed Yet.
There is a document sitting on the FCA’s website, published this week, that could reshape how every mortgage in the UK is originated over the next five years. It is called the Open Finance Roadmap. It is not a consultation paper or a vague statement of intent. It is a plan, with timelines, named use […]
The Rise of Glue Work
Every team has one. The person who notices that two departments are building towards completely different outcomes and quietly sorts it out before anyone else even realises there’s a problem. The person who onboards the new joiner properly, not just with a laptop and a login, but with the context they actually need. The person […]