There used to be jokes in tech circles to the effect that when companies talk about AI it's because they're fundraising: That's because AI feels exciting and futuristic while at the same time being so broad that it can mean almost anything. It's like the word "Vehicle". There are many different types of vehicle for different purposes, some more scary than others.

Claude is great at adding new code. After some point this gets a bit problematic. And indeed I had a codebase that was starting to suffer: It now had lots of gnarly code that needed tidying up The …

Or, another reason for serious journalists to not get their analysis from X. Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, wrote on X he personally thinks chances of AI destroying humanity is more than 10%. His post kicked off a whole news cycle. It even sucked in The World at One: "Britain's leading political programme." Here is how they covered this story: …

In the run-up to their IPO, SpaceX said their TAM was $28.5 Trillion. Funnily enough, Dario Amodei from Anthropic has now come up with $30 Trillion for his TAM. It's a pissing contest about who can say the biggest number and keep a straight face. And people who consider themselves intelligent and sophisticated just nod along. Stripe said that the Singularity started this year…

Part of my side-project's codebase uses Flan T5 XL for some generative tasks. Flan T5 is an LLM that was released in October 2022. The XL version that I use has 3 billion parameters. Might sound like a lot but it's small by modern standards. Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters. It has been hogging a lot of resources on my machine.

Structured, sourced company news: product launches, M&A, investments, leadership changes, regulatory issues. Every event links to a real article. REST API and MCP server available.

Syracuse Company News has been working really well on company news (better than the alternatives), but on industry news it hasn’t been so strong. It has been improving so I asked Claude Opus 4.8 to review Syracuse’s performance on industry news since March based on the stats in the benchmark that compares Syracuse with Exa, Linkup, Perplexity and Tavily. Here is what it had to say:

Seems like a good guideline for working in this wacky world of AI. The context: This is about my side project, Syracuse Company News ( It's a structured company news provider that you can plug your agent into and be confident you're getting decent quality results with less risk of false positives / irrelevant stories fouling things up compared to other search tools.

It’s well-documented that Gen Z / Gen Alpha are not exactly fans of AI1. And that older professionals can’t live without it. My own 9 year-old kid has told me that games made with AI are terrible and that “we can’t ask AI, it lies” (in the case we were talking about, it did lie). Marc Andreessen believes he has a superpower prompt that helps him understand anything.

I received two newsletter subscriptions within an hour of each other today regarding Anthropic's new Mythos-class AI model, named Fable. First, Ethan Mollick getting blown away by Fable's capabilities, then Gary Marcus being a lot more cynical about Anthropic's expert media manipulation. Ethan Mollick got Fable to do some truly exceptional stuff. And he writes really well, you can absolutely feel his awe coming through.

Joe Moura, CEO at Crew AI If it's a problem that the system gives a different answer each time, then maybe it shouldn't be an agent. This one cuts through a lot of the hype. Agents are amazing at many things, but it doesn't mean they are the right tool for everything. Business systems need determinism (audit trails, controls, predictability, explainability etc).

Working with Claude Code makes me feel like I'm in Memento, the 2000 film about someone trying to solve a mystery. The twist is that he can't make new memories. Every time he figures out something he has to resort to a patchwork of notes and tattoos so he has something to start from next time his short-term memory resets itself.

I built a company-news API and I wanted to know whether it was better than the alternatives. The problem: I'm the author, so I'm biased — and I wanted to use an LLM as the judge, which makes it worse, because a model that recognises my product (and works out it's being scored on behalf of its creator) has every incentive to soften the blow.

I found myself talking to two different data leaders last week in two different places. Two different leaders who work in completely different areas. Completely different. Yet they both used the same word to describe a great data person: "Curiosity". A curious data person is someone who spends time in the data, finds interesting patterns and then uses that to create insights.

The death of SaaS in the age of AI - e.g. people building and running their own CRM systems rather than using Salesforce - is overstated. I think we are more in a pause-calypse than an apocalypse1. The hype is overbearing. There is no end of people writing about the business they launched last weekend off a vibe-coded app.

This is a story based on some work I'm doing on my side project, syracuse.1145.am. It's an example about how with AI I can do much more than what I could do before and how I had to level up my thinking to make the most of it. The story is about python programming, and specifically about how scrapy manages its spiders.

Remember in the "BC" times (Before ChatGPT) when AI meant something different to what it does now? It's what we saw in science fiction films. It was something that either felt human-like or felt super-human. It was more likely to be logical than creative, but it could still be wise. It was very hard to define it precisely. My favourite definition was…

Good news: The UK govt is looking for input into its strategy for encouraging more entrepeneurship. Link here in case any of my network have not yet submitted their views: It ends on 28th Feb so please do go ahead if you haven't already. Bad news: The questions highlight a blind spot at the heart of the UK establishment's view of entrepeneurship…

Gen AI is changing everything. Gen AI is a bubble. Gen AI is coming for your job. The current AI disruption is getting more coverage than previous ones I've seen. It's because of the sorts of jobs that it is disrupting. It's affecting programmers. When social media started killing journalism there was a dark joke going round: "learn to code". Well, now the coders are among the ones being disrupted.