Kerson AI Solutions
I’ve just dug up my old photocopy of John Searle’s Minds, Brains and Science, the 1984 Reith Lectures, which I copied at university in 1998. It’s the only book from that time I’ve still got, carried from the UK to Singapore and through every place I’ve lived since. I kept it because something in it...
Specialised Compute, Data Movement, and the Strange Return of the Coprocessor A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an Intel 80287 floating-point coprocessor that I bought for my first PC around 1990. It was a separate piece of silicon designed to do something the main processor wasn’t particularly good at: floating-point mathematics. Then I...
Open a desktop computer and the RAM slides out. Two clips, a firm push, done. Any competent teenager can upgrade it. Open the same machine and look at the graphics card. The memory there is soldered permanently to the board. On the newest AI hardware it sits beside the processor on the same package, a...
There is a lot of talk at the moment about AI agents escaping, collaborating, circumventing restrictions and even appearing to protect themselves. The language we use to describe this is revealing. The AI wanted to escape. It decided to deceive. It knew what it was doing. It wanted to survive. But perhaps nobody is home....
Floating Point, Specialised Compute, and the Persistence of a Good Idea I am staring at the old 80287 board from my first PC. I have kept it for decades, stuck to the chassis of successive computers. Today it sits beside a workstation with an NVIDIA RTX 4080. That got me thinking about floating point. When...
On 29 August 1997, Skynet became self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time. At least, that is how it happened in Terminator 2. Twenty-nine years later, it seems as good a date as any to start keeping score. This is not a list of the ten biggest AI stories of the month. Model releases, benchmark records...
And why getting information back out of one is harder than it looks Almost everyone who works with documents has, at some point, been surprised by a PDF. Text that cannot be selected. A copied paragraph that pastes as gibberish. A table that arrives in a spreadsheet as a single column. An extraction tool that...
In 2025, researchers at Palisade ran more than a hundred thousand trials in which a language model was given a short series of maths problems to solve. Partway through, the environment warned the model that the next command would trigger a shutdown script and leave some questions unanswered. Several models moved the script. Some renamed...
Why the feeling of being understood is manufactured, and how it got into the machine. In 1966, a computer program called ELIZA convinced people it understood them. The trick was almost embarrassingly simple. ELIZA took whatever you typed and reflected it back as a question. Tell it "I'm worried about my job" and it would...
Imagine an assistant on a ship at sea. The crew can ask it questions about the vessel’s technical manuals: how to service a pump, what a warning light means, which checklist applies. There’s no internet connection for days at a time, and even in port, the client doesn’t want sensitive documentation leaving their control. That...