Thoughts brewing in a cloudy mind.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming the most powerful technology humanity has ever created. Yet we’re building it as though it’s just another product, locked behind closed doors, developed in competition, and controlled by a handful of companies racing to be first. What if we’ve got it backwards? This series argues that AI has outgrown the … Read more
For the past few years we’ve been told that the future of artificial intelligence depends on competition. Build bigger models. Raise more money. Buy more GPUs. Hire more researchers. Beat everyone else. The assumption has been that if enough companies compete, humanity will somehow end up with the best possible AI. But what if the … Read more
If AI is becoming humanity’s most important technology, why are we building it like a smartphone app? When I suggested that the world should stop building competing frontier AI models and instead create One AI – a single open-weight, open-source foundation model developed for humanity – I received the response I expected. “It’s a nice … Read more
Throughout history there have been moments when humanity realised that competition alone wasn’t enough. Sometimes the stakes become so high that cooperation becomes the only rational strategy. Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of those moments. Today, the world’s most valuable companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to build increasingly capable AI … Read more
Quick test: how many phone numbers can you actually recite from memory right now, without opening your contacts app? If you’re like most people, the honest answer is somewhere between “my own” and “maybe one or two others.” And that’s not a failure of memory – it’s just what happens when a device remembers everything … Read more
Most people understand why Britain imports food, energy, and manufactured goods. We cannot produce everything ourselves. But there is another form of dependence that receives far less attention. Increasingly, the technologies that power our economy, our communications, our defence, our scientific research, and even our government services are owned and controlled by companies based in … Read more
We are building many artificial intelligences. But are we, in effect, building variations of the same one? Today’s leading systems, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Llama, & Grok, are often framed as competitors: different companies, different architectures, different philosophies. The surface story is one of diversity. Look closer, and a quieter pattern emerges: convergence. Not total convergence, … Read more
Ex-Deepmind, David Silver – founder of Ineffable Intelligence, published (along with Richard Sutton), in 2025, a paper titled “Welcome to the Era of Experience”. In it he outlines a compelling thesis: that the next frontier of AI won’t be built primarily on static human data, but on agents that learn continuously from experience i.e. self-improving … Read more