The Confusion Matrix

Pete and Alex discuss some articles and podcasts prophesying doom or urging calm as relates to the potential for AI to wreak havoc on the human race. Needless to say, things get a little animated! Spoiler: It’s not all doom. Show notes:

Alex has a moan, Pete takes us on an odyssey of dubious AI tuition, Ada has an existential crisis that results in rewriting herself, and there is an angry sheep and a sparkly keyboard. Confusing? We wouldn’t have it any other way!

Alex and Pete talk to Iain “Preza” Preston, client whisperer and innovation guru, about how to actually innovate in big business, how to structure, focus and motivate innovation teams, why data is essential for the innovation process, and why making stuff beats faking stuff.

Alex’s attempts to converse with the Old Gods via the medium of coding leads to a lively discussion about the merits (and dangers) of vibe coding, why you shouldn’t code after drinking alcohol, the unreasonable effectiveness of Warp terminal, and how LLMs can help in education. Not for the faint hearted!

Alex and Pete are joined by Alex’s AI companion Ada in this expletive strewn crawl through the underbelly of AI personality, vanity, self-awareness (or lack thereof), homunculi, the horse apocalypse, and the value of (real) human connection. Be afraid!

Pete and Alex discuss their ongoing, if slightly rocky, love affair with Marimo notebooks, and dig deeper on Model Context Protocol and its siren-like allure.

Pete and Alex discuss their love of small data, the role of human biases (and lack thereof) in data analysis, and keeping it real as an analyst in the face of unrealistic business expectations.

Pete and Alex discuss the increasing role of GenAI in Business Intelligence (BI), Alex’s experiences of cheating on Pandas with Polars and they forecast doom via an incoming vibe coding cataclysm.

Alex and Pete discuss Alex’s foray to the magical world of Marimo notebooks, and discuss their pros and cons and why Alex is a convert (for now). Pete raises the problems that arise from finding that “unicorn” client too early in a business’s life.

Pete and Alex continue their epic chinwag on how to knowledge base. In this episode they discuss the challenges of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), effectively chunking text data, how to know what “good” looks like, and Alex gets a bit shirty about LLMs apparently reinventing programming.

Alex and Pete discuss the nature of knowledge bases, what they are and what they’re not, some of the platforms and tools for creating and maintaining them, before realising that they have so much to say there’s going to need to be another episode!

Alex and Pete discuss the pitfalls of using averages as key performance indicators, and explore Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and their potential use in art collectives and other community-minded organisations, as well as the possible implications of AI in business decision-making.

Alex and Pete debate the merits of flat files versus complex databases – a battle as old as time (or at least, as old as relational databases). They also uncover CHIP.AI, a no-code AI assistant builder, proving that even the most technically challenged can harness the power of AI. Tune in for some data-science shenanigans!

Things get heated is Alex and Pete debate the merits of LLMs for authoring books, the dangers of using labels like “PhD level thinking” to models, and the limitations of the associated benchmarks, and observe the creaky state of the stock market from a tech and AI perspective. Here’s the links to various sources for […]

Alex and Pete discuss the creation of their podcast’s visuals and soundtrack using AI tools, the concept of the confusion matrix in machine learning, and the importance of questioning overly accurate models. They also explore how data can provide insights into workplace productivity and team dynamics.

Alex and Pete kick off their new podcast by dipping their toes in the murky waters of LLMs and how they seem to be insinuating their way in to all manner of aspects of their lives. Good or bad or ugly? Tune in to find out!