In a recent TED talk titled One Thing to Teach in the Age of AI, innovation practitioner Bryan Cassady shared a story about an exam created by one of his colleagues. The exam question was deceptively simple: “Prove you’ve learned the material in this course by giving me five good questions.” Many students struggled with that, and certainly … More What Makes a Good Question in the Age of AI
If AI really turns out to be normal technology, an increasingly persuasive case Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have continued to advance, what happens to the competitive dynamics and industry structures for the organisations operating in that space? Using a synthesis of Porter’s Five Forces Framework, Helmer’s Seven Powers and Oberholzer’s Value Stick that I … More If AI really turns out to be a normal technology, what happens to industry structures?
A significantly expanded version of a paper I shared earlier on Privacy Technologies for Financial Intelligence is now published in the Journal of Economic Criminology’s Special Issue on Economic Crime in a Changing World: Emerging Threats and Strategic Responses. The paper is open-access and written for a broad non-technical audience. It can be found here: … More JEC Special Issue on Economic Crime in a Changing World
We have substantially revised the factored conditional filtering paper to frame it more generally as a solution for belief acquisition in AI agents. Here’s the revised paper on arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02178v3 Here’s the abstract: This paper studies how belief acquisition can be accomplished using stochastic filtering. First, a theoretical foundation for empirical beliefs is outlined. Then … More Belief Acquisition as Stochastic Filtering
Using sequential hypothesis testing techniques to check the modelling assumptions of Bayesian mixture estimators is a promising way of getting value out of combining the Bayesian and frequentist approaches to probability. Here’s a paper to show how that can be done for Context Tree Weighting and related methods. Paper Abstract: Universal Bayesian sequence predictors like … More Martingale Tests for Model Misspecification in Bayesian Sequence Prediction
All my life I have been searching for simple and effective methods for constructing prediction intervals for different AI/ML models. I don’t know why I never encountered Conformal Prediction until recently, but I suppose it is better late than never. Conformal prediction is (arguably) the most elegant and practical technique for improving the robustness in … More Notes on Conformal Prediction and Testing
Threat modelling is now considered a best practice in comprehensive technical approaches to dealing with AI safety issues [S+25]. Threat modeling [S14] is a structured, proactive process used to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities in a system. While the traditional focus is on cyber-security and privacy issues, threat modelling has been extended for AI systems … More AI Risk Assessment via Threat Modelling
AI governance and AI assurance are sometimes conflated in conversations but they are not the same thing. In simple terms, In more details, the AI Governance Framework for an organisation is the strategic blueprint that defines the organisation’s overarching approach to developing, deploying, and managing AI systems. Its purpose is to define the roles, responsibilities, … More AI Governance vs AI Assurance
I read a couple of really good books on China’s economic system this year that I can recommend for those who want to know the country better (from a distance). The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism by Keyu Jin taught me about mayor economies, and how China’s centrally planned economy is actually executed … More Book Recommendations on China’s Economic System
Like many difficult cyber security problems, prompt-injection attacks is likely to become an ongoing issue that shifts and turns with the continual discovery of new attacks and new defences going forward. Instead of responding in natural language given a prompt, the best current defence I know involves always generating code, say, in a safe interpreted … More Thoughts on Prompt Injection Attacks
Mental Models 4 Life 