Two banks, one message, and what it means for the rest of us
In the space of 24 hours this week, the chief executives of HSBC and JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in Europe and the largest in the United States, both stood in front of their own people and said something striking. Not striking because it was new. Striking because they said it out loud. AI is […]
The Regulator Is Asking What Good Looks Like. Mortgage Brokers Should Answer Before Someone Else Does
The FCA has opened something called the AI Input Zone, and most mortgage brokers will never hear about it. That is the problem. It is not a consultation on draft rules. There is nothing to object to, no proposal to push back on. The regulator is doing something quieter and, in its way, more consequential. […]
The EU AI Act is being delayed. What that means for UK businesses
In November of last year, the European Commission published a paper called the Digital Omnibus. Buried in it was a proposal that would delay the most consequential parts of the EU AI Act by almost eighteen months. Last Thursday, after months of trilogue negotiations, EU lawmakers reached a provisional agreement to do exactly that. The […]
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 […]
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 […]
Britain Is Spending on AI. Just Not Well Enough.
Two per cent. That’s how much the average UK business spends on AI as a proportion of revenue, according to a new study from PwC. The global leaders, companies in the top 20 per cent of AI-driven performance, spend five per cent. And they’re getting 15 per cent back. UK firms get 10. You could […]
The AI That Covered Its Tracks
The most striking detail from last week’s Anthropic announcement isn’t that their new model, Claude Mythos Preview, found a 27-year-old security vulnerability in a major operating system. It isn’t that the model identified thousands of critical zero-day flaws across every major OS and web browser in a matter of weeks, work that would take the […]