The regulator that reads every file
Anyone who has been through a network file check knows how it works. Someone picks a sample, maybe ten cases, maybe twenty, and reads them properly. The fact find, the research, the suitability letter, the file notes. If those hold up, you get a clean report and everyone goes back to work. Most of the […]
The ice cream problem
A friend of Anne Boden’s asked Meta’s new AI assistant, Muse, to get her some vanilla ice cream. It found some on Deliveroo and sent her a link so she could pay for it. Boden, who founded Starling Bank, tells the story in the FT this week, and she isn’t impressed. “That’s not an autonomous […]
The question behind the question
Someone asks how much they can afford to overpay on their mortgage. You look at their income and outgoings, work out what’s genuinely spare, and give them a figure along with how you got there. The arithmetic holds up. A decent spreadsheet would have produced the same number. According to the people who built the […]
Four inspectors, four thousand mills
In 1833 Parliament appointed Britain’s first factory inspectors. There were four of them, and between them they were supposed to police conditions in around 4,000 mills. Unsurprisingly, the law they were enforcing was widely evaded. Those four men still mattered more than most of the legislation that came before them. Parliament had already passed laws […]
If the AI boom turns, will UK mortgages feel it like 2008?
At the 2007 peak, half the money lent on UK homes had no evidenced income. The lending that broke then has largely gone, so if the AI boom turns, the pressure would arrive another way.
The Silence That Made Bill Gates Speak Up
Bill Gates spent a few days recently with his two granddaughters, aged three and one. What stayed with him afterwards was a question that really vexed him. What is education actually going to be for, by the time those two are old enough to need it? Gates published an essay in late August called “A […]
The book Steve Jobs didn’t enjoy reading
In the spring of 1992, Steve Jobs stood in front of a lecture hall of MIT Sloan students and opened his talk not with a product demo, not with the NeXT story, but with someone else’s book. The full recording sits on MIT’s official YouTube channel, and about three and a half minutes in, Jobs […]
Four British banks are helping build an AI model from scratch. That should make you curious.
Picture the sort of institutions that almost never agree on anything. HSBC. Lloyds. NatWest. The London Stock Exchange Group. Now picture them sitting around the same table, not to lobby a regulator or carve up a market, but to help design an artificial intelligence model. From the ground up. On British soil. That is roughly […]
The Rules Nobody Voted For
Every time you tap your card to pay for a coffee, you are trusting a rule that nobody in the queue could name. Not a law. A standard. A technical agreement, hammered out years ago in a committee room somewhere, that decided how the chip in your card talks to the reader on the counter. […]
When Google’s AI Chief Says Nobody Knows What Happens Next
Demis Hassabis published a manifesto this morning. The co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and by most measures the person closest to the frontier of artificial intelligence, set out his view on where the technology is heading and what ought to be done about it. The essay covers AGI timelines, […]