Steve O'Hear

Check out my latest UKTN column!

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After OpenAI raised $6.6bn last week, I wrote for the Financial Times Lex column about the increasingly difficult lifecycle of the unicorn. There are around 1,500 private companies worth $1bn, but few reach real scale - which Bain & Company defines as $10bn of revenue and $1bn of cash flow. The likely reason is that founders are getting easy money from pumped up VCs without having to show proper business skills. But some folks in Silicon Valley (including many founders themselves) take the opposite view: that the real unicorn-killers are management-think and corporate governance police. https://lnkd.in/eWtYnq45

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The tech industry's drive for efficiency is quasi-religious. Does this make digital immortality and employee cloning a logical next step? Dan Thomson, founder of UK startup Sensay, makes the case for digital cloning of knowledge workers. #digitalcloning #businessefficiency #AIclones #AI #corporategovernance

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Really good piece this on the lurking challenges for the technology that everyone’s talking about but many people don’t know what to do with. There’s about to be a huge bloodbath for VC-backed lightweight LLM wrappers. But also big questions for OpenAI’s business models. An Enterprise model for ChatGPT might be a thing, but that interface isn’t great for everyone and a lot of the value already freely exists in Bing.

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Councils look to help boost voter turnout with AI. 8x8 launches AI-powered solution for councils to help increase electoral engagement and reduce local authorities’ election workloads. #ai #artificalintelligence #publicsector #generalelection #localauthorities

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The new GOV.UK Forms platform is ready to enter a public beta phase - and the Government has bigged it up to the extent of a press release aimed at the public. The key feature is akin to the 'low code, no code' approach of some commercial software, enabling civil servants to develop online forms without coding or design skills. A couple of points: It has taken three years to develop, which suggests it should be robust and ready for wide use in central government, and will provide an important tool. While this should ultimately make things easier for the majority of the public who can fill in forms online, there are still millions who can't or won't, and for the foreseeable future the paper option will have to remain available. https://lnkd.in/e-t3nu9F #ukgovernment #govtech

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PWAs: Past, Present, Future https://buff.ly/4e6gyzG The first working draft of HTML5⁠, then known as Web Applications 1.0, was released on September 1, 2005. For context, that’s almost 18 months before the first iPhone was released, over 3 years before Android was released, and over 4 years before the terms Mobile First⁠and Responsive Web Design⁠ were coined. Source: PWAs: Past, Present, Future | ChromeOS.dev (https://buff.ly/4d1YohW)

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🌎 The #USIT guides have been a product of international sector-wide collaboration. Guides for the sector by the sector. ✨ Taking inspiration from US-BOLT, the guides have benefitted from continuous conversations with TenU members Orin Herskowitz, Lesley Millar-Nicholson and Karin Immergluck. Orin also supported our first meetings, helping us to persuade early contributors that this was worth the effort. 🙏 Thank you to them and to all of the people in the UK and elsewhere who have turned the USIT guides into valuable references to help accelerate research to market for societal and economic growth. ⬇ Download the guides here: https://ten-u.org/ #Collaboration #Impact

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AI is both a “friend and a foe” for tackling the data quality crisis, according to Melanie Courtright, speaking to Liam Kay-McClean in the final episode of Research Live’s three-part podcast series on data quality. If you haven't listened to the podcast yet, catch up with all three episodes here: https://lnkd.in/eJ4BucnA #DataQuality #SyntheticData #mrx

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New tutorial for how to use Saturation budgeting, going to be doing a lot more videos in the coming weeks, smash the like button and murder that subscribe button (that's what the cool kids say) also yes I know I have a face for radio... 🤣 https://lnkd.in/g3amZdUj #filmbudgeting #eventbudgeting #videobudgeting #commercialbudgeting #filmmaking

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Tech companies have built out a massive infrastructure to collect enormous amounts of data on each and every one of us — and that has consequences. On Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry to discuss the threat of data colonialism. Listen to the full episode: https://lnkd.in/eNRtuaaf #techindustry #surveillance #artificialintelligence #datacenters

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The UK public doesn't know much about connected places/smart cities, and from what it does know it doesn't trust the technology involved, according to the results of a survey commissioned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. It could be taken as a bad sign, given that plenty of local authorities are flagging up smart city initiatives. But I would say the lack of awareness is the key point, and that as more people become aware of what the technology does, and that generally it doesn't use personal data, they will become more relaxed with the outlook. https://lnkd.in/euWjABuX #localgovernment #smartcities #connectedplaces

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East Riding Council has adopted a formal policy for the use of generative AI. I wouldn't swear to it, but think this is a first for local government in the UK. Given the increasing use of the technology, and a sense that it could provide big gains in productivity, I should we'll see a lot more local authorities laying down clear rules for its deployment. While the policy lays out steps and safeguards that will be familiar to people in digital roles, it should provide useful guidance to those who are not familiar with debates on the safe and ethical use of digital tech. https://lnkd.in/eUkbQrGh #localgovernment #genai #generativeai

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The case for GB Cloud The AI revolution will need massive computing capacity to enable it. In this paper Demos ‘ Elizabeth Seger with UKDayOne calls for the next government to invest in sovereign compute - GB Cloud - to develop cost effect and resilient compute. GB Cloud should be a public interest company offering discounted access to the NHS, public services and researchers and start-ups and could have parliamentary oversight and public consultation to ensure it is a trusted resource for the nation. The next will have to pick some targets to stimulate growth. This is a good bet. https://lnkd.in/eg28dipv

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From communicating with citizens better to expediting research and accelerating planning applications, #AI can make countless tasks performed by public-sector workers better, faster and cheaper.   The UK must follow in the footsteps of the private sector and embed AI into every government department and across every public service to make government more efficient and save the country money.   Read the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’s latest paper about how AI can transform public services for #FutureofBritain:  https://bit.ly/4bCEN7s

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Big data research and AI has created competing narratives with one side often lamenting the 'rise of the machines' and another side extolling the amazing things that we can learn with big data research. I never bought into the Terminator view, but have been increasingly frustrated with big data research because it's largely descriptive and once we get beyond the pretty pictures, it just wasn't as satisfying because I wanted to get beyond sentiment... I wanted to test and/or build theory not just look at very very (did I mention very) cool visualizations and trends. Then earlier this year my husband came across a RAG/LLM/NLP tool that didn't talk pish (i.e., addressed the well-known problem of hallucinations in tools like ChatGPT and other AIs) AND didn't require a PhD in computer science to use. LlamaParsing was developed to help organizations sort through their jillions of pages of documentation logically and usefully. But in academic terms, what it allows us to do is big data qualitative research and theory building/fit testing. So, I am really excited to share a piece of research that was just posted online today in Corporate Communications: An International Journal where Stuart and I tested the validity and reliability of this LlamaParsing RAG procedure in theory building and testing big data against a chunky data set related to Scottish independence conversations on Twitter (always Twitter, never X). Spoiler alert... yeah... it worked amazingly well. 😉 Apparently, if you can use R for big data analysis, you do can this (that's what Stuart says... that wasn't my contribution ;) ). https://lnkd.in/d-Wpfwhj

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🎉 Excited (and slightly terrified) to share that I've been featured in Rolling Stone! We dive deep into how AI is reshaping the creative landscape—not just for the big players, but for all of us makers, builders, and entrepreneurs. Spoiler: I'm bullish on the future, even if my engineering skills might say otherwise! 😅 Check out the full article and let me know what you think! Could AI be your next creative partner? https://lnkd.in/enzENjAN #ArtificialIntelligence #Creativity #TechForGood #RollingStone

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