Jason du Preez

Anyone who has interest in high quality structured data should listen to my partner Nik go through masterclass in modern, real-world entity resolution at scale - truly best in world https://lnkd.in/eQS_6ycb

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A great case study, detailing how The Duckhorn Portfolio are using Claret, resulting in significant increases in forecast accuracy. Check it out (perhaps whilst enjoying a glass of one of Duckhorn's wines...) https://lnkd.in/e-kVPR9C #sop #ibp #demandplanning

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Dr Kobi Leins (GAICD), thanks for alerting us to REINSW’s new AI board advisor, Ms Alice Ing, and for your expert insights into key issues this “appointment” raises for directors. I’ve been researching the trends in other jurisdictions, and I’m not at all surprised this has eventuated in Australia, be it a genius publicity stunt or genuine attempt to enhance the REINSW board’s data driven decision-making. Or both. While company directors in Australia must be what the law calls natural persons—at least for now—there’s strong potential for so-called AI advisors to proliferate in corporate boardrooms. Dr Leins’ points about the risks of LLM inaccuracies, magnified when coupled with magical thinking (what I know of as “the tech nirvana fallacy” or “technochauvinism”), are very important for directors to heed. As to adding value to a board via appointing highly capable women non-exec directors before looking to anthropomorphised AI bots, thanks for pointing that out Dr Kobi Leins (GAICD) 👏🏻 And why is AI so often feminised?! Corporate law academics have been engaging with the topic of #AI in the boardroom for several years, and there are some great papers out there for those who are as deeply interested in the future of digital governance as I am. I particularly recommend papers by law professors Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci https://lnkd.in/gymD2sJ2 and Dr Akshaya Kamalnath https://lnkd.in/gWixajdV #DigitalDirectors #AIGovernance #DigitalGovernance

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Just completed an Ascender course on business case creation - this quote below from the course content is so profound and relevant: https://lnkd.in/eQ3FDas6

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Should employers subsidise public transport for their teams? An interesting read from City AM today (🔗 in comments) focusing on new research from the ONS highlighting the slowdown in London's productivity growth since the financial crisis. The data suggests a correlation with low productivity and office attendance (🥱...nothing new there!). Its a sensitive issue but irrespective of your opinion on productivity at home vs in the office it appears average days per week in the office in London lags behind many other international cities. One of the suggested improvements for this is subsidising travel costs for employees. “London’s workers are by far more likely to cite that travel costs are a barrier to getting back to work than workers elsewhere,” What grabbed my attention is an interesting comparison with our French neighbours. The French labor code requires employers to cover a minimum of 50% of commuting costs, many cover the entire cost. This feels like an interesting concept that could help with the cost of living and encourage people to spend more time together. The UK has the most expensive public transport costs in Europe. British employees can spend up to 20% of their salary on commuting, whist in France data I've seen indicates this to be nearer 6%. In 2023 the average change in regulated fares in the UK was 5.9% the highest since 2012. Its not getting cheaper either! Average gross salaries in France are also higher than the UK, which perhaps reinforces the squeeze that UK commuters feel. Lots to digest but in my experience I'm increasingly feeling people do want to get together more often for purposeful and personal connections. My gut feel is that subsidised transport would help support this. But from a business perspective the potentially significant increase in organisation labour costs is a hard swallow. Additionally it's considered a taxable benefit currently. What do you all think? - Are there examples of companies in the UK paying for employee public transport to the office - do those that do see higher office attendance? and would you be happier going to an office if your travel was paid for?

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🚀 A Wake-Up Call for Bristol Startups As CTO of Agilebase, I followed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last year. That event offers a crucial lesson for Bristol's tech ecosystem. The venture capital model isn't always the best path forward. Key takeaways: 1. SVB's failure was partly due to the herd mentality of VC investors 2. VC funding comes with hidden costs for founders:   • Distraction from core business   • Potential dilution of ownership   • Pressure for unrealistic growth 3. Success stories without VC:   • Beacon Compliance: Grew from £18k to £250k turnover without outside investment   • Agilebase: Profitable since day one, no external investors The alternative? Building a sustainable ecosystem in Bristol: • Focus on organic growth • Reinvest profits • Use flexible tools that scale with your business At Agilebase, I am committed to supporting this model with our no-code CRM platform that grows with your business. Let's learn from Silicon Valley's ecosystem-building approach, not its blitz-scaling mentality. Bristol has the potential to create a thriving tech scene on its own terms. What's your experience with funding? How can we build a stronger, more sustainable tech ecosystem in Bristol? #BristolTech #Startups #SustainableGrowth #NoCode https://lnkd.in/ecd5ftcC

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At EHE Ventures, we turn ideas into global firsts. Here's how we do it: ✅ Funding Support: Get the capital you need to grow. ✅ Coaching and Mentoring: Straight-talking advice for fast growth. ✅ MVP Scoping and Tech Build: Turn your tech ideas into market-ready products. We're "Entrepreneurs Helping Entrepreneurs" and we’ve got what it takes to build and scale successful companies. 👉 Learn more about our success stories: https://hubs.li/Q02DxCzK0 #EHEVentures #TechSuccess #Entrepreneurs #Investors #AIFunding #TechInnovation #GrowthFunding

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We are digesting the Data Access Use Bill. But here are the key headlines to chew on while we deep dive. The key issue with much of the Bill is the lack of certainty - it leaves all the big decisions (like how any proposed initiative will actually work) to regulation, which creates even more uncertainty which is particularly frustrating given the crucial need for certainty around data sharing to unlock economic growth and innovation in the UK. In light of this the Bill broadly introduces these initiatives:    1. Digital Verification Services - introducing a secure digital identity verification framework, allowing UK citizens to use digital identities with the same confidence as physical documents. It could mean streamline annoying processes like employment checks, opening bank accounts and age verification online. 2. Smart Data - consumer directed data sharing. A facilitated access and portability right (think article 12 and open banking - but bigger). The main issue with this is that the cornerstone of the regime is consent - and we all know how failed that mechanism is (see Adtech). 3. Critical Infrastructure Data - standardization of underground infrastructure data, for safety and efficiency. It’s about time - but what about above ground assets like batteries, EVs, smart meters - that can all cause significant safety risks!? We would have loved to have seen this go further like the EU Common Data Spaces. 4. Data Sharing in Research - to us, this is the biggest missed opportunity! Please bring back the changes to the definition of personal data from the previous Bill - without it these changes don’t mean much because there is too much legal uncertainty around aggregation and identification! 5. Legitimate Interest - a bombshell moment. Clarifies legitimate interest can be relied on for direct marketing, network and systems security and intra-group sharing for administrative purposes (guessing that includes HR?). 6. Purpose Limitation - finally, this amendment will bring much needed clarity on secondary purposes. Controllers only need have to consider the reasons in which they collected the data, rather than the reason the data was originally collected. But it’s still not clear (to me at least) how it will work in controller-to-controller situations. 7. Direct Marketing - again another missed opportunity to clarify the position on cookies and tracking for the ad tech industry! Permitting direct marketing via legitimate interest is only one part of the puzzle - but thanks for trying. More to come… if you’re interested in any particular part of the Bill, future proof your business or want to engage with the legislative process, reach out to the Friday Initiatives team! See more about the Bill here: https://lnkd.in/euRCqdc2

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Anthropic’s latest generative AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, is outperforming industry giants like OpenAI’s GPT-4o on key benchmarks after its release. This new model is reported as Anthropic’s “most intelligent model yet,” excelling in reasoning and coding tasks while running twice as fast and at a fifth of the cost of its predecessor, Claude 3 Opus. Claude 3.5 Sonnet was released last Thursday and has quickly climbed to the top of league tables, including the LMSYS Chatbot Arena for coding and hard prompts, ranking just behind GPT-4o overall. It is part of a three-model family, combining features of the Haiku and the Opus models, designed for efficient, high-throughput tasks. #ai

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Sometimes I write on X (free speech and all) and its too much work to port it over to Linkedin (where you can get cancelled). Until I figure out how to post on both - please have a read and a follow me on X. Latest thread about where we are on Bitcoin and key take away's from Glassnode's latest hodler data can be found below. https://lnkd.in/guXajDS7

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A key document, do take a look if you get a chance #smartdata #futurefocus PEXA UK

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https://lnkd.in/eWK3ZVsM RAGs have become the standard architecture for providing LLMs with context in order to avoid hallucinations. However even RAGs can suffer from hallucination, as is often the case when the retrieval fails to retrieve sufficient context or even retrieves irrelevant context that is then weaved into the LLM’s response.

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AI and market concentration: what are the risks? Should we be happy to let big tech just get on with it and shape this nascent market or are the regulators right to be concerned? Very interesting points to views from Simon Hansford and Mark Boost

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AMA with Sam Altman and Harry Stebbings at the first OpenAI Dev Day in London. After an exciting agenda of demos, developer workshops and roadmap disclosures Sam answered the community‘s questions: 🤖 expect the speed and maturity to further increase, even faster 🦾 investors and clients should expect a journey not an end state 🦿 imagine when anyone can create a company‘s worth of software While many predict another tech hype bubble to burst the counter argument would be the potential business value unlock that AI still holds. Thanks for sharing and thanks for getting a great community together in real life. And spoiler alert - 🇨🇭Swiss German for S2S is not that high on the backlog priority list - but then, you never know. Ferris #composableai #agenticai #regulatoryai Bal Balaji Reto Isenegger Marko Kleiner Felix Caprez

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Technically having a long context is still not enough

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Carve-outs have become an increasingly important tool for buy and sell side parties. They provide an alternative avenue for buy-side parties looking to get deals done, with the opportunity to execute value creation plans and turbo charge previously under-invested assets.

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A UK based SaaS platform built on LLMs recently announced that they were offering insurance against errors as an optional extra. I have been struggling to decide what this means for LLMs. Never before (not that I know) has a software company offered insurance against errors in their platform. In fact when I started negotiating contacts (just a few years ago), the point of contention was consequential loss. In no way were we going to be on the hook for any business impact that our solutions might generate. And let's be honest there were impacts (let's not talk about the client that upgraded to 64Bit and went down for 3 days losing millions). So offering insurance with your platform says one of two things: 1. We have done such a great job of dealing with hallucinations that you will never need the insurance but we are offering it as a statement to the market. 2. LLMs will always hallucinate and if you are looking to make business decisions based on our technology you need to protect yourself. Technology has always had it's issues. I remember being part of a company that launched a new Accounting Systems for law firms built on a Microsoft platform. We announced this to our clients at our annual client gathering. Someone in the audience put their hand up and asked whether the system, like windows, would suffer from the blue screen of death (remember those days). Technology has always been fraught with challenges, however, the advent of SaaS has gone someway to improving reliability (in my opinion). There is so much controversy around LLMs you have to ask whether we are moving forwards or moving backwards? To be clear there are always questions around new technologies, however, in my experience they tend to be whether or not the technology will be adopted (metaverse, blockchain), not is this technology going to put my business at risk. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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The english paperback version of my book is now available (don't mind the missing rating - it should autofix itself in the coming days) https://lnkd.in/ezKaUCnj #startups #StartupLife #Entrepreneurship #personaldevelopment #management #technology #booksofinstagram #booksoflinkedin #BookLovers #ReadingCommunity #Inspiration #Fiction #BasedOnTrueEvents

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