Essays on enterprise AI — adoption, governance, and what actually works.https://www.ai.biz/https://www.ai.biz/how-frontier-models-got-cheaper-to-train/https://www.ai.biz/how-frontier-models-got-cheaper-to-train/Two clocks run in AI and they tell different times. One says a frontier training run costs half a billion dollars. The other says the same capability will cost a tenth as much a few months later. This is an essay about the second clock.Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/ai-biz-is-back/https://www.ai.biz/ai-biz-is-back/The site is relaunched — new stack, new design, essays restored from the archive.Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/case-for-slms-and-classic-ml/https://www.ai.biz/case-for-slms-and-classic-ml/We've a problem in the tech world. Many teams get carried away and reach for LLMs when all they need is a straightforward classifier or regression model.Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/case-against-manhattan-scale-ai-farms-and-what-beats-them/https://www.ai.biz/case-against-manhattan-scale-ai-farms-and-what-beats-them/The AI future worth building is not Manhattan-sized data-center of GPUs, but shoebox-sized breakthroughs in physics, algorithms, and chips.Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/effective-ai-governance-frameworks/https://www.ai.biz/effective-ai-governance-frameworks/As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies advance rapidly, effective governance frameworks are essential to mitigate risks, ensure ethical deployment, and foster innovation.Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/practical-ai-governance-a-starters-guide-for-organizations-big-and-small-using-open-source-tools/https://www.ai.biz/practical-ai-governance-a-starters-guide-for-organizations-big-and-small-using-open-source-tools/In the fast-paced world of AI, governance often sounds like a lofty, bureaucratic hurdle, especially for companies just dipping their toes in.Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/why-95-of-genai-pilots-fail-and-how-to-make-yours-succeed/https://www.ai.biz/why-95-of-genai-pilots-fail-and-how-to-make-yours-succeed/Generative AI is everywhere in boardrooms today.Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/are-we-over-estimating-ais-future/https://www.ai.biz/are-we-over-estimating-ais-future/The hype is everywhere and the investments are massive — but what if we're expecting too much, too soon? We've been here before: flying cars, Mars colonies, limitless nuclear energy.Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/how-much-ai-is-too-much-ai/https://www.ai.biz/how-much-ai-is-too-much-ai/We've quietly accepted AI for writing emails but raise eyebrows when a student uses it to draft a thesis. So where do we draw the line — and is the real question how much AI, or how we use it?Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/the-llama-leak-was-the-most-important-release/https://www.ai.biz/the-llama-leak-was-the-most-important-release/Meta shared model weights with researchers, the weights escaped within a week, and within a month people were running them on laptops and fine-tuning them for a few hundred dollars. Whatever anyone intended, the question of who can run a capable language model is now settled.Tue, 11 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/chatgpt-is-a-demo/https://www.ai.biz/chatgpt-is-a-demo/Three weeks after launch, everyone in your company has tried it and half of them have opinions about what you should build. The expectation shock is the real event, and 'just add a chatbot' is about to become the most dangerous sentence in your roadmap.Mon, 19 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/stable-diffusion-changed-the-math/https://www.ai.biz/stable-diffusion-changed-the-math/Two months ago, image generation was a service you rented from one of two companies. Now the weights are on your hard drive and it runs on a gaming card. That's not a better product, it's a different market structure.Tue, 11 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/chinchilla-your-model-is-too-big/https://www.ai.biz/chinchilla-your-model-is-too-big/DeepMind trained a model four times smaller than its predecessor on four times more data, and it won on nearly everything. The whole field had been building models that were too large and too undertrained, and the correction is worth money to anyone serving them.Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/the-alignment-paper-that-explains-the-product/https://www.ai.biz/the-alignment-paper-that-explains-the-product/OpenAI's InstructGPT work shows a model a hundred times smaller being preferred by human judges over the original. The technique isn't a better architecture. It's asking people which answer they liked, and that changes what these systems are for.Tue, 19 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/lora-fine-tuning-without-the-bill/https://www.ai.biz/lora-fine-tuning-without-the-bill/Microsoft's LoRA paper freezes the entire pre-trained model and trains a tiny fraction of new parameters instead. Ten thousand times fewer trainable weights, comparable quality, and you can keep a hundred specialised versions on one machine.Tue, 14 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/stop-tuning-the-model-fix-the-data/https://www.ai.biz/stop-tuning-the-model-fix-the-data/Andrew Ng has spent the year arguing that the field has been optimising the wrong half of the problem. In enterprise settings I think he's straightforwardly right, and the evidence is in every project that stalled at eighty per cent accuracy.Tue, 17 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/every-model-trained-before-2020-is-now-wrong/https://www.ai.biz/every-model-trained-before-2020-is-now-wrong/Demand forecasts, fraud detection, credit scoring, staffing models. They all broke at the same time this year, for the same reason, and most companies still don't have a process for noticing when it happens again.Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/175-billion-parameters-and-no-fine-tuning/https://www.ai.biz/175-billion-parameters-and-no-fine-tuning/OpenAI's GPT-3 paper does something the previous ones didn't. You describe the task in plain English, show it two or three examples, and it does the job with no training at all. That changes who gets to build with this.Mon, 20 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/your-data-science-team-isnt-shipping/https://www.ai.biz/your-data-science-team-isnt-shipping/You hired good people, they built models that work, and nothing has reached production in eighteen months. This is the most common failure in the field and it is almost never about the modelling.Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/the-model-isnt-the-risk/https://www.ai.biz/the-model-isnt-the-risk/OpenAI announced a language model and then declined to release it, saying it was too dangerous. The debate has been about whether that was responsible. I think it's the wrong debate, and the right one is about what your business does when plausible text becomes free.Tue, 02 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/bert-reads-both-ways/https://www.ai.biz/bert-reads-both-ways/Google took the pre-training idea, let the model see the whole sentence instead of half of it, and posted results that embarrassed everything before them. Then they published the weights. That second part is the business story.Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/from-enthusiast-to-practitioner/https://www.ai.biz/from-enthusiast-to-practitioner/Three years ago I watched a team train a model and realised I'd been writing about a craft I'd never performed. I went and did the coursework. Here's what actually changed, and it wasn't the algorithms.Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/pre-train-once-fine-tune-forever/https://www.ai.biz/pre-train-once-fine-tune-forever/OpenAI's new paper reads seven thousand unpublished books, learns nothing in particular, and then beats the state of the art on nine tasks out of twelve. If labelled data has been your bottleneck, read this one.Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/google-duplex-was-unsettling-thats-the-point/https://www.ai.biz/google-duplex-was-unsettling-thats-the-point/A machine phoned a hair salon, said 'mm-hmm' at the right moments, and booked an appointment without the person on the other end knowing. The demo was extraordinary. The reaction to it was the more interesting result.Tue, 10 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/gdpr-is-live-your-model-is-a-data-processor/https://www.ai.biz/gdpr-is-live-your-model-is-a-data-processor/Most compliance work has focused on cookie banners and consent forms. The harder questions are about the models, and almost nobody has answered them: what happens to a right to erasure when the data is baked into weights?Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/ai-is-not-the-new-electricity/https://www.ai.biz/ai-is-not-the-new-electricity/It's a good line and it's doing real damage in boardrooms. Electricity was a utility with a standard socket. This is a bespoke, brittle, data-hungry capability that has to be rebuilt for every problem. Budget accordingly.Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/attention-is-all-you-need-and-all-you-should-budget-for/https://www.ai.biz/attention-is-all-you-need-and-all-you-should-budget-for/A Google paper in June threw out the recurrent network entirely and beat the state of the art in translation after three and a half days of training. Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/when-the-model-is-biased-the-business-is-liable/https://www.ai.biz/when-the-model-is-biased-the-business-is-liable/ProPublica's investigation into risk scoring in the American courts is the most important thing published about machine learning this year, and it has nothing to do with accuracy. Disparate impact does not care that software made the decision.Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/tay-lived-sixteen-hours/https://www.ai.biz/tay-lived-sixteen-hours/Microsoft launched a chatbot that learned from the people talking to it, and had to shut it down before the end of the day. It's the clearest governance lesson this field has produced, and almost nobody is drawing it.Mon, 25 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/alphago-isnt-about-go/https://www.ai.biz/alphago-isnt-about-go/DeepMind's program beat Lee Sedol 4-1 last week and the coverage has been breathless. The technique is genuinely important. The reasons it worked are also the reasons it won't transfer to your business, and that's the part worth understanding.Mon, 21 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/152-layers-deep-and-easier-to-train/https://www.ai.biz/152-layers-deep-and-easier-to-train/Microsoft Research just won ImageNet with a network eight times deeper than anything before it, and the trick was to let layers do nothing. It also crossed the human error rate, which changes the conversation about what you can buy off the shelf.Mon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/google-open-sourced-its-crown-jewels/https://www.ai.biz/google-open-sourced-its-crown-jewels/TensorFlow is free, and the reflex is to ask what the catch is. There isn't one, exactly. But the strategic logic behind giving away your machine learning infrastructure is worth understanding, because it tells you where the real asset sits.Mon, 23 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/an-afternoon-at-kepler-labs/https://www.ai.biz/an-afternoon-at-kepler-labs/I spent a day with the team Ajay Vishnu works on, watching them teach a computer to recognise hand-drawn doodles. I went in curious and came out with a reading list and a slightly embarrassing sense of urgency.Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/the-boring-paper-that-will-save-you-money/https://www.ai.biz/the-boring-paper-that-will-save-you-money/Adam is not a breakthrough in what machines can learn. It's a breakthrough in how little babysitting the learning needs. If you're paying for GPU hours and engineer hours, that's the paper that matters.Tue, 17 Feb 2015 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/the-data-lake-is-where-data-goes-to-drown/https://www.ai.biz/the-data-lake-is-where-data-goes-to-drown/The vendors have a new word and it's doing a lot of work. Schema-on-read sounds like flexibility. In practice it means nobody agreed what anything meant, and you find out eighteen months later.Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/two-networks-walk-into-a-room/https://www.ai.biz/two-networks-walk-into-a-room/Ian Goodfellow's new paper sets two neural networks against each other, a forger and an inspector, and lets them train each other. The pictures it makes today are tiny and blurry. Put it on your risk register anyway.Tue, 05 Aug 2014 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/leaving-kondra-and-an-idea-that-stuck/https://www.ai.biz/leaving-kondra-and-an-idea-that-stuck/I left Kondra Systems last month after nearly four years. The thing I keep thinking about is a project we never built: an assistant that manages your time. It was David Vogt's idea and I thought it was ten years early.Wed, 14 May 2014 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/google-paid-half-a-billion-for-deepmind/https://www.ai.biz/google-paid-half-a-billion-for-deepmind/A London company with about fifty people, no product, and no revenue just sold for a reported four hundred million pounds. That price tells you something important about where capability in this field actually lives.Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/after-prism-your-retention-policy-is-a-liability/https://www.ai.biz/after-prism-your-retention-policy-is-a-liability/The summer's disclosures changed what a database is. It used to be an asset you protected. It's now also a set of obligations you inherited, and most companies have no idea how many they're carrying.Mon, 07 Oct 2013 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/words-as-numbers-what-word2vec-means-for-business/https://www.ai.biz/words-as-numbers-what-word2vec-means-for-business/A team at Google worked out how to turn words into coordinates, and trained the whole thing on a billion and a half words in under a day. If your business runs on text, this is the cheapest useful thing you'll read about all year.Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/a-neural-network-just-won-imagenet/https://www.ai.biz/a-neural-network-just-won-imagenet/Every year there's a computer vision competition you've probably never heard of. This year a team from Toronto didn't just win it, they broke it. And the way they did it should change how you think about your image data.Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/nate-silver-didnt-get-lucky/https://www.ai.biz/nate-silver-didnt-get-lucky/He called all fifty states while television pundits called it a coin flip. The lesson for business isn't about polling. It's about the difference between a prediction and a probability, and why your company almost certainly makes the first kind.Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/ninety-milliseconds-to-predict-a-click/https://www.ai.biz/ninety-milliseconds-to-predict-a-click/A long look at how modern ad systems decide what to show you, and what happens in the tenth of a second between a page loading and an ad appearing. Written by someone who is still working out how half of it fits together.Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/every-company-wants-a-data-scientist/https://www.ai.biz/every-company-wants-a-data-scientist/The job title barely existed four years ago and now it's on every hiring plan. Most of those roles will fail, and they'll fail for organisational reasons rather than technical ones. Here's what breaks.Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/big-data-is-a-storage-bill-not-a-strategy/https://www.ai.biz/big-data-is-a-storage-bill-not-a-strategy/Everyone is standing up Hadoop clusters and calling it a data strategy. Storage got cheap. Asking good questions did not. Here's how to tell which one your company has actually invested in.Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/watson-won-jeopardy-now-what/https://www.ai.biz/watson-won-jeopardy-now-what/IBM's machine beat the two best Jeopardy players alive, and the coverage has been about as measured as you'd expect. The technique is real. The economics of putting it in your business are not, yet.Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ai.biz/hello-world/https://www.ai.biz/hello-world/A first post. I've joined Kondra Systems in Gurgaon, I've been handed a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer, and I've started wondering what happens to everyone who drives for a living.Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT