Blog

Building things, thinking about AI, and everything else that catches my attention.

• A human in the toolbox

  I want an AI agent to be able to book a few minutes of my time.

• Kasabian, ACT III: following the guru

  I like Kasabian most when they let a ridiculous idea survive the edit. ACT III has that confidence. Big choruses, short songs, and enough oddness to make me want to…

• Pizza, drones and a strange night in Frankfurt

  Eight years later, I keep returning to a few scenes from Frankfurt: a pizza, a friend I had no reason to expect there, lights moving together above the river, and a…

• Making the Physical World Programmable

  Software has eaten the world. Now it must pilot it.

• LLMs as tutors: one difficult idea at a time

  I have been using GPT to work through a difficult idea: four-dimensional spacetime. What interested me was how readily it could break an intimidating subject into a…

• The Joy of Creation

  I still remember the first lines of code for Askdata. We wanted people to ask questions of their data in ordinary language. The ambition was easy to describe; making…

• From AI-driven software to AI-driven robotics

  Teaching AI makes the gap between software and robotics hard to miss. Students can assemble a software application quickly. Giving a machine a useful physical…

• Alex Gerko, the "super geek" that is reshaping FX

  What interests me about Alex Gerko and XTX Markets is how much of the business sits inside its software. Research, computing infrastructure and price forecasts…

• The joy of teaching AI

  Teaching AI at LUISS and LUISS Business School has a useful side effect: it exposes the gaps in my own understanding.

• Real or AI generated? That's the question

  Tracks attributed to Taylor Swift and Drake have prompted arguments about whether listeners are hearing authentic recordings, impersonations or AI-generated audio.…

• Phi-3: a language model small enough for a phone

  Microsoft’s Phi-3-mini is interesting because of where it can run. The 3.8-billion-parameter model is small enough to deploy on a phone. In the researchers’ tests, it…

• Economic Resiliency Amid Global Challenges: The Role of AI

  The world economy has been more resilient than many expected in 2024. That is encouraging, but growth figures alone do not settle the questions raised by geopolitical…

• Robotics, simulation and multimodal AI

  At NVIDIA’s March 2024 GTC, robotics, simulation and multimodal models appeared increasingly connected. I am interested in what that combination could make easier to…

• From Traditional Outlets to AI-Personalized Content

  Media distribution has moved from broad editorial choices towards increasingly personalised feeds. As a data and AI entrepreneur, I am interested in what happens when…

• A forecast still needs a decision

  A forecast of demand does not tell you how much stock to buy. It gives you information you can use to make that decision. The distinction sounds obvious until a…

• CEOs, GenAI and the data underneath

  Before asking what generative AI can do for a company, I would ask where its answers will come from.

• Intuition needs feedback

  I trust experience more when it can explain what would make it change its mind. That is where intuition becomes useful in a business: it gives you a starting point,…

• My case for a global economy soft landing

  I'm reading Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization by the economic historian Harold James.

• Embracing Machine Intelligence: No Need for Anthropomorphism

  I often hear AI discussed as though its value depends on how closely it resembles a person. I find it more useful to ask what a system can do, where it fails, and…

• Prediction is intelligence

  Much of what we call intelligence involves anticipating what happens next. We learn a pattern, use it to form an expectation, and change our behaviour when the world…

• Discovering beauty in the everyday urban environment

  I am interested in the places we pass through without giving them much thought: subway stations, pavements, convenience stores. They make up a large part of a city,…

• Learning new languages

  Learning another language changes what I can read, who I can talk to, and how much I understand when I travel. Working in technology makes it easy to spend more time…

• The power of beauty

  I care about the appearance of the places we share. A well-kept street or a thoughtful public space can make everyday life more pleasant. I am interested in what that…

• The SAP exit: a startup is a team sport

  There are two of us signing in this photograph. It took a whole team to get there.

• A winter at Y Combinator

  For a few months, home was a Zeus apartment on Taylor Street, near Union Square. I still have a picture of coffee going into the black Zeus mug. It is an ordinary…

• Demo Day, then back to the negotiations

  I look happy in the photograph with Giuseppe outside Demo Day. I was happy. I was also exhausted: I had spent the night dealing with an existing investor who opposed…

• Getting into Y Combinator, on very little sleep

  When Solomon called to tell me we were in Y Combinator, I was alone in San Francisco. Giuseppe had already left. I had spent the day walking around the city, after a…

• A suit, a shared dormitory and a talk at the ECB

  Jacket and tie for the European Central Bank. A bed in a hostel room shared with twelve other people for the night. Both belonged to the same trip, and the…

• Teaching an algorithm to watch football

  We spent nights and weekends trying to turn “he's having a good game” into something a computer could calculate.

• Two screens, one match: how we convinced TIM

  We invited TIM executives to watch Italy play Costa Rica. On one screen was the match. On the other were two numbers, one for each team's performance, moving through…