Episode #22 – Sweaty man-boobs
This week’s podcast starts with (what Neil thinks is) a hilarious story about Kieron’s brush with a makeup artist who had (what Neil thinks) is the worst job in the world. The clue is in the podcast title. Poor lady…
Kieron also talks fashion (I know… who knew) and how AI is not just disrupting that world, but an app that just a few years ago would have raised millions as a start-up is now just a prompt.
We talk about AEO being the new SEO because LLMs don’t care about the adverts. But why, rather than writing your website copy for SEO engines, you should be writing it for humans. Peter Whent’s humorous book Brandw*nk is a great read about the boll*cks people write at work and why no-one says “leveraging synergies” in the pub.
It all comes down to trust in AI. Related to that, we talk about the future of newsletters and how Nate B. Jones (their favourite AI guru) has the fabulous superpower of being able to talk at both end of the Strategy/Techy-Detail spectrum in language that anyone can understand.
Big news that JISC, the UK’s education technology body is going to run a pilot of KnowledgeFlow for up to 10 universities and FE Colleges.
And does being nice to your AI make it want to work harder for you? There’s two ways to find out. The best one is to listen to this podcast.
Two mates. A bar. Thirty years of business between them. And all they want to talk about is AI.
Pull up a stool — we’ll get the beers in. 🍺
TRANSCRIPT
This week in Leading AI…#22 – 21 Jul 2026
Neil Watkins
Good, I can I can hear you now, which means we can get the this pantomime horse for podcast underwear, right? Have you you’ve got your shirt on, Scruffy? Have you been through hair and makeup yet?
Kieron White
I had a makeup artist one time and one of the things I did, yeah, did not, yeah, for VMware, they had me do some stuff for their CIO sort of VIP groups and I had to do, I had to do some filming on, it was the hottest day at the time, a few years ago, and it was like something got 35 or something and
Neil Watkins
What? What?
Yeah, yeah, I remember that.
Kieron White
And they said, bring a variety of clothes and then our creative director will choose what he wants you to wear. So he put me in the bloody, he put me in the bloody pullover, didn’t he? So I’m in the jumper and sweating and they had a makeup artist and I was like, that’s going to be weird. And so I had to see the makeup artist and she was like, well, you don’t really, you’re not really very shiny. I’ll put a little bit of anti-shine on.
Neil Watkins
Ha ha ha.
Kieron White
Guess what though? She spent most of the afternoon drying the sweat underneath my man ***** with a hair dryer.
Neil Watkins
It.
I mean, that’s a rubbish job, that isn’t it? That’s the worst job in the world I can think of.
Kieron White
So, what?
Will.
She said she’d had to do it for Downton Abbey when they filmed their Christmas special in the summer and they were all in these massive coats. But I was like, oh, here I’ve got a makeup artist. I finally hit the big time and her whole day job was holding, as soon as they finished filming a scene, they then run me off and I’d have to go and get dried again under my man ***** with the…
Hair dryer, it was it was a humiliating day.
Neil Watkins
Ha ha ha!
That’s brilliant. You’ve never told me that story. That’s fantastic.
Kieron White
I don’t know. Well, there you go. Well, now I’ve shared it with you and Matt on the audio.
Neil Watkins
That’s right, yeah. Now three of us know. Oh, the poor makeup artist who’s probably still in therapy as she’s trying to recover from the awful experience. Oh my God.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Exactly. She was very good about it in the way that you would be, going, yeah, no, this happens all the time, sir.
Neil Watkins
Poor, poor lady. Oh, my goodness. Crikey, I don’t know where to go from there. Should we try to talk about somebody else?
Kieron White
Ha.
Well, I can take you straight into a good segue because there’s a board. This is, I was reading this thing this week on 5.6 Sol, the ChatGPT’s latest model, or one of them. They, I saw this post from Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, and yeah, sorry,
Neil Watkins
Go on then.
Yeah.
No, didn’t win.
Yeah.
Kieron White
He sends me posts. I think it’s just for me. I think it’s just for me. Yeah, I’m not sure. There seem to be some other people liking it as well. But anyway, anyway, this is a wardrobe app. So my other half was very excited about the potential of it. And you basically take a load of photos of you in your clothes.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
And contacted me, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
and then it creates like a kind of what looked like a kind of shop for you with all your clothes and you can put them together in different ways and it can suggest different colours of the same things that fit you well and blah, blah, blah. The point was, Sam Altman’s comment on it was this would have been a whole new startup not long ago and now it’s something you can just do.
you just get your phone out, you know, spend a few minutes or probably a couple of hours taking photos, write a bit of prompts, and you’ve got one. It’s kind of like, what does that mean for the world? I mean, it’s the AI disruption of all those kind of things that, yeah, that would have probably raised 5 million in funding and had a little crack out there and tried to sell a few.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes.
Kieron White
Of its of itself, and here it is, just do it yourself.
Neil Watkins
Wow, that is incredible, isn’t it? I was thinking about the pace of developments, not just because of the models and the new ones coming out and tools like that. But think about it for ourselves, really, because this last week, I think it was last week, we joked about Ben winning a bet because Donald said he wasn’t going to put any
and he make any new developments and he’d failed by Wednesday and Ben was still to collect his money on that bet. But again, similar thing this week. It’s just like the whole kind of like 10 past eight this morning. Are you busy? Can I borrow with you a second? Can you just, I’ve just, I’ve created a web app so that you can have knowledge flow directly into your desktop. So it is that.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
Can you press that button? Oh, yeah, it works. Perfect. Right. OK, crack on. Brilliant. I guess. But the other thing that kind of made me think yesterday was I, we were pitching to a healthcare organisation and we’ve got limited staff in healthcare currently, but good enough.
Kieron White
Yeah, amazing.
Neil Watkins
just to definitely talk about. But they were talking about some features, which I said, I think we’re doing similar things in housing. So we demoed some of the stuff that we’re doing in housing, and they could see immediately the crossover, the kind of relevance, the kind of how the application. And it was, but what struck me was,
Kieron White
Mm.
No, it’s.
Neil Watkins
I hadn’t seen half of the bloody things. It was all, it was new to me. It was like, hang on a sec, how did I not know about stuff that we just do it ourselves? And so that whole kind of pace of development and working with customers and developing new stuff and getting through it is just, it is incredible. And that whole kind of, you know, that step-by-step stuff that he’s done where you kind of
Kieron White
Ha ha.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, do this, do step one, and then it tells you what to do on step 2. So there’s kind of, there’s no room for kind of error in the approach. And what these health people are saying, we can’t afford for there to be any deviation from the process because it’s got to end up looking like this. It’s like, oh, just show them the step by step step.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that’s what those are, as you know, that’s what they’re designed for. And also with the regulatory angle on that, with knowledge flow being able to capture the audit trail of what happened and each change and everything that went through that process, you’ve then got something that should you, it should end up in a complaint or something even more formal than that, then you can have the full trail.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
which is the part that other apps are not able to do, frankly. And of course, all of that is stored inside your own Microsoft Azure tenancy, all down there for you securely. So yeah, really good. Yeah, I’m glad to hear that they can see the read across often, as we’ve talked about before, customers find it sometimes very difficult to say, to see something in a different sector and see the application in theirs. So it’s great if they’ve got that.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
that innovation, that imagination. So good stuff. That sounds encouraging.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, it is interesting because Helen, Mrs. Watkins will say to me, I can’t imagine, you know, I struggle with the imagination piece. I can’t do the imagination thing. And I think we’ve got some customers like that. It was the, it was the kind of the story we were talking about on stand up of the other customer going, oh yeah, that’s good. And then just moving on and not doing anything about it, just kind of not.
not seeing how things would develop. But these guys, these guys didn’t lack for imagination. What they lacked for was common sense. It was like, oh, and can it do this? And oh, can it do that? And could you just, it’s like, we could do all of those things, but two things. It takes time and effort.
Kieron White
Mhm.
Neil Watkins
and money and I’ll come back to the money piece in a second. And you need to prioritise because you’ve just given me like 87 things you want doing. It’s like, where do we start? What’s the most important? And actually, what’s the most important?
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly. And what always happened is they, I get this a lot, is they want all these little things, well, it’s got to be like that, it’s got to do that. And then they’ll come and tell you that it’s got to be really cheap. And it’s that same old project management triangle or whatever it’s really for, but I always think of it as that, it’s scope, time and quality and budget. If you’re moving one, another’s going to move.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
That’s why I kind of not fell out, but if you remember, there was a customer which I ended up pricing high so that they would say no to us. And it was exactly that because they were kept on going, well, we’re a charity and we’ve got no money, but it’s got to do this. And you’re like, it doesn’t need to do that. That’s a preference. What it does, what Knowledge Flow does as a platform will do.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Mm.
Kieron White
what you need really, really well, you are just adding these things because for a reason leaders and managers add things, whatever, sometimes for right and sometimes just because they thought of it just now. And it’s, yeah, I wish people would get kind of understand if they want that bespoke solution, then you’re not going to get it as a
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
As a normal price, so…
Neil Watkins
Now, indeed. And we also suffer, as we have done with a couple of customers recently, where somebody new comes in and you’ve got to start again, or a new IT person comes in and here’s my 30, here’s my 30 questions, which I’ve just knocked out of ChatGPT that you now have to answer within 30 seconds or
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
Or, or I don’t like it, it’s just like absolute bonkers, just, yeah, it was some real, some real challenge.
Kieron White
Yeah.
That is frustrating, that part. And the fact that they come to us on that is a bit annoying to me. I mean, it’s inevitability that the one we were talking about on stand up today is like, well, all of this stuff exists already. You’ve already asked all of this. You’ve got paperwork on all these things. You should be asking yourselves before you come to us and having meetings with us and asking all the same questions again.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
So, yeah, it is very frustrating.
Neil Watkins
Your predecessor went through, you made us jump through all these hoops and we passed all the tests and the contracts are there and your purchasing people went through it and, and, and, but you’re just being lazy and just trying to make that, you come in new and you feel like you’ve got to make an impression and you want to do something.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
And it feels like the wrong thing to do, but that’s frustration with customers. But I’ll say, I’ll say the cost thing. I thought, yeah. So yesterday we talked to our good, good old friend, Cameron Merzer, and there’s a great podcast episode coming out for those who are interested. But
Kieron White
Ohh, yes.
Neil Watkins
One of the things he said that really struck me, so Cam, really fascinating chap, but he now works out in the Middle East for an NGO supporting higher education across Middle East and North Africa. And he said there’s a number of senior leaders in
Kieron White
Okay.
Neil Watkins
education in, especially in Africa, you think AI is free and you have to tell them that it’s not free and they’d absolutely gobsmack that it’s not free. And I was like, and I was, and I was like, hang on, that’s really, how can you know? Anyway, I’m on this call yesterday with this healthcare group and then the guy goes,
And we start asking, I mentioned cost and he was like, what? He said, oh, is it not free then? I was like, what? He was, are you serious? Yes.
Kieron White
Tea.
What do you think we’re doing? Just turning up and spending our days doing this stuff out of the goodwill of our hearts?
Neil Watkins
Well, it’s not just that. It’s because people are fixated on the kind of whole, yeah, I can get, I can get onto the free ChatGPT and I can get onto these free models and I can use Gemini or whatever and I can use them. It’s like, yeah, you can, but for all the reasons we’ve talked about, like security, like accuracy, like trust, like
confidentiality, like GDPR, all the things that you say are important to you. Funnily enough, there’s a cost that comes with that stuff. The fact that they said it, I was absolutely, are you serious? Just unbelievable, unbelievable.
Kieron White
Yeah, exactly.
Crazy. They just keep shoving their data into the free tools instead and getting crap answers and muddling their way through. Yeah, exactly. So I had Nate B. Jones, our favourite little person we follow. He accepted my LinkedIn request at last. So I don’t know what changed for him. I reckon he’s obviously heard about us.
Neil Watkins
That’s right. See you in GDPR Court.
Wow, now!
Wharam.
Is he, is he, is he listening to the podcast?
Kieron White
And maybe all this talk about.
Yeah, I imagine he’s our only listener, but perhaps now. Anyway, so I was very, I was very excited to see him, to see him.
Neil Watkins
Ohh, maybe.
So he should be. Yeah, he hasn’t accepted mine. He’s happy to take my money for his Substack post because, yeah, yeah, but you know, it’s good. Actually, he is really excellent and I’ve said before, you know, he is our, he’s our guru and we listen to him a lot and he has some great things to say. Actually, both what I really like about him
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
He’s right in the, he’s a bit like you, Kieron. Or I should say, you’re a bit like him, which were, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he comes at things from two completely different ends of the spectrum, which makes him really interesting as a character, because he goes right into the weeds. He’s got his own.
Kieron White
But…
A witch.
I wish I was like him.
Neil Watkins
benchmarking that tool that he’s created. He tests all the LLMs, he goes into some detail, he goes into real detail, real hard tests for these. And then he comes at it from a kind of strategically, here’s what you need to do as a CEO, and here’s all the things you need to think about in terms of your organization, your customers, and
Kieron White
Mm.
Neil Watkins
and the direction of charity of business. And the ability to kind of do both things, but also bring them together is actually, I think, one of the things that’s quite unique is there is a lot of nonsense talked about AI on the on the interweb.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
And, and he’s one of the few people that I kind of kind of, he’s one of the few go to people that I’ve got. So, I really, I really like him. And that kind of links to something that I also wanted to talk about. So, there’s a guy called Peter Went who we’ve worked with in the past. He’s a really nice chap. I had a really excellent, he’s really good at the marketing.
Kieron White
Ohh.
No, yes.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
stuff and really good at the messaging piece. And he wrote a book called Brand ****, which is really interesting and talks about how corporations and organisations, especially on LinkedIn, if you look at someone’s LinkedIn profile, it’s just absolute gobbledygook nonsense. And his question is, what does that even mean? What does that mean? What are they saying? I don’t know what they do. Or what does that mean?
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
He’s really, he’s really, really good. So I was one exact about Nate is actually he can translate that technical nonsense into simple language that anyone can understand. But yeah, I’d highly recommend Peter’s book because it’s most entertaining and actually really good.
Kieron White
Yeah, absolutely.
Neil Watkins
really good messaging on language in general, but also how do you kind of not fall into the trap of, which lots of people clearly are, of using LLMs to write their marketing, their LinkedIn profile, their website copy. And actually his real major point is if you do that, you’re not going to stand out from the crowd and therefore whatever you’re spending on advertising or
Whatever you’re doing is just going to be wasted because you’re just one of one of a gazillion others. So yeah, really interesting perspective.
I think they are, I think 10, yeah.
Kieron White
and in the UK. And you know, in a world where you, so they do all kinds of things and they do research for customers and lots of lots of things and their website has lots of kind of answers and the latest reports and things. In a world where AI can get you straight to a lot of that stuff, there is clearly going to be an erosion of their market and true of so many organisations, particularly if you’re in the information
sharing collation business. But the key, I think, is the differentiator is trust. And it’s a bit like, you know, if you use perplexity for search and you have a look at the sources, I’m much more likely to look at the stuff that’s, you know, a trustworthy source, the FT or something, than I am from Unknown Caravan Weekly website or whatever.
Neil Watkins
And.
Yeah.
Kieron White
So I think that that’s what brands should be thinking about is how do we maintain the trust over our stuff and make sure that what we do is good and accurate and we continue to put it out. But the thing that Nate has done, which is, I think, a future for the world of newsletters and
news in general. Nate’s got his MCP server where he has all of his kind of content. You can plug your AI into it and effectively ask your version, with all the stuff your AI knows about you, of Nate’s story. And so instead of reading something that we all do, and you know, bits of an article are relevant and bits aren’t,
The idea is that everything you read will be personalised to your situation, to the challenges you have. But obviously coming from Nate’s perspective on whatever it is, that I think is really interesting, that idea that in the King’s Fund world, I mentioned it to their marketing team, in the King’s Fund, they put out a newsletter.
Neil Watkins
Mmh.
Ohh.
Kieron White
use this version of the newsletter and it will now only or specifically bend everything to the why that matters if you are a clinician in a hospital or a manager or somewhere else. I think that’s really interesting.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, the personalization piece, really good.
Kieron White
Yeah, really, I think that’s clearly a future. It’s already happening. And I think that got, you know, in the other sort of my other interest in the world, I’ve spent not insignificant amount of time in my career doing transformation programmes with the big advertising groups. So with WPP, with Dento, Group M,
Neil Watkins
Okay.
Kieron White
I’m a part of WPP. And the so I’m kind of I’m always sort of slightly interested in their world and the things they grapple with and the effectively the SEO search engine optimization. So getting your page seen on Google on the first page.
Here’s the interesting thing. With AEO, I think they call it various, there’s various different phrases. I think people are still trying to win the name for that new version of how do you get your website seen by an LLM. Well, the first thing that’s interesting is LLMs will largely ignore any sponsored content. So if you’re paying to be on top of Google, well,
whatever, LLMs will look on page 3, four of the search results, whereas it was always about getting on page one. I mean, this is all just stuff to think about. I’ve got no real expertise in what you do about all of this. And then Nate talked about this a long time ago, is the way chunking works and the
sort of token sampling, if you like, that an LLM does when it’s doing a search for you is different. And it seems so you can either try and write your copy in chunk sizes that LLMs will like. It’s one way. The latest thing I’ve been reading is making your copy more conversational.
is apparently working to get you onto the LLMs when someone’s searching for what, what snack should I, what chocolate based snack should I eat on my break today to make me feel joyous and happy? How do you, how does KitKat appear at that point? Is they need to kind of be matching that kind of search as opposed to someone searching for chocolate based snacks, which they might do in Google. You’re going to be saying,
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
I’m having a break and I’m wondering what kind of chocolate I should have. I’m not in anyone.
Neil Watkins
That’s really, that’s really interesting. So, two things. One is, come back to the Peter Wendt point about writing for humans. And I get it, you know, actually, if you, if you, if she’s got, if you’ve got AI word salad slop on your website, you know, no one’s going to understand it, no one’s going to read it.
making it more human. But also, how do you do that and make it LLM readable? Because actually, the last two customers who’ve come to us unexpectedly found us, told us they found us through ChatGPT. Now, I was amazed at that. So, you know, because we’d not structured our website or our content.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah, interesting.
Yeah, it’s great.
Neil Watkins
for that particular route. But actually, one of the things on my mind after reading Peter’s book and thinking about the NET stuff is actually, we need to do both. You can’t, I think you need to do both. You can’t do one or the other. I think you need to do some kind of both. Now, some people might think that’s
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
heretical, but see, I think that’s what I’m planning to try and do.
Kieron White
Well, I shared with you a while ago, I’ve seen one website that has an LLM friendly version of their entire site. It’s basically just one page with a markdown file of their whole site.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, you mentioned that to me three or four times, and I think you’ve given up because you think I’m not going to do it. That’s not actually true. Well, the reason I haven’t done it is because all the website will never be finished. It’s the fourth row bridge, you know that. Yeah, yeah. But the point, the point is all the feedback I’ve had from
Kieron White
Yeah.
Well, you know, clearly.
Just waiting to get the website finished, aren’t you? Yeah, once away.
Exactly.
Neil Watkins
Claude and others is is that actually it doesn’t make any difference.
Kieron White
Yeah, yeah, I understand.
Neil Watkins
It’s actually the quality of the writing, not the fact that there’s a markdown file, because it already strips out the kind of the blocks, the Gutenberg block. See, there you go, you know what a Gutenberg block is. Exactly. And actually, you don’t need to know, because actually it strictly doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t look, it just looks at the…
Kieron White
Already.
What would Peter Wendt say of that comment you just made to me? Would he would he would he approve of your throwing some difficult words at me to try and throw me off the scent?
Neil Watkins
It.
He would absolutely be cross with me for that. He just he just shake his head again. Oh, God, Neil. So yeah, but the point is that the AI strips all that stuff out anyway, then actually you don’t need to just do it as a markdown file. Interesting. I wondered whether that was kind of virtue signalling on behalf of whoever was writing a bloody website.
Kieron White
Haha.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
Oh, look at me, I’ve put my LLM markdown file down at the bottom so that everyone gets that. Because actually people like you fall for it.
Kieron White
May well be.
Oh, you cheeky monkey. Maybe it’s the thing that’ll make a difference. People like you are biassed against, biassed against it for no reason at all. You’ve got to.
Neil Watkins
I…
Well…
I don’t know. I’m not bad. I’d like to see the evidence, Kieron. I need to trust the evidence. Exactly, exactly.
Kieron White
Well, there isn’t, no one can really see it, can they? It’s too difficult. Reddit is, so I see a lot of that in perplexity search and I hear the AI search one, because those fast moving sites, Reddit is, I think, is open as you can search it, whereas Twitter have restricted the ability for robots to get in there.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
It is sort of, you get to get more current stuff. So I think they rely on it because you’re getting things so fast moving. If you search it, you’ll get some things from right now. But then you also get the weirdness of all of that coming into your, because Reddit is a bit like Twitter and it’s kind of like just random comments and trolling and all the rest of it that comes with it.
So yeah, interested. The whole world is a very peculiar future, well not peculiar, fascinating future and that sort of world, it does interest me a little bit of how do you get audience attention still and what will be the, and it seems like, and this is great, there’s an organisation I’ve done some work with who I very much admire, the Ozone Project, who are
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
I’m going to try and use their brand marketing, but they basically work only, on behalf of advertisers, work only with high quality journalism. So if you work with them, your ads are not going to appear on ******* and God knows where else. They’ll only appear on trusted websites.
And I think that whole world of trusted media, the LLMs are using that too. So to go, so I think they may be well onto something. Now the question is, how do you get somebody from a perplexity search to the website to see an advert? Or how do you get the advert into the perplexity site?
That’s the that’s the next challenge for everybody, I think.
Neil Watkins
Well, I’m going to concentrate on trying to produce better content, which is very human-centric. It’s very clear. It doesn’t use any of the, it doesn’t use AIW star star star language. And
Kieron White
That’s awesome.
Neil Watkins
but also that there’s lots of it so that actually the SEO and ChatGPT continues to put us out there as one of the people doing trusted private regs. So yeah, I was super excited by that, actually, the fact that we’re actually making some progress with that. And
Kieron White
I love it.
Neil Watkins
As I said, customers coming to us out of the blue is really exciting.
Kieron White
Yeah, it’s good. So I was this week, yesterday, in fact, I was on a or giving us host, what’s the word? I wasn’t hosting it. I was on a webinar anyway for with JISC for our JISC pilot. So JISC are in the UK. They’re apparently the biggest, the world’s biggest provider of private
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Kieron White
Is it cloud private connection? So they connectivity, so they run the use the dot AC dot UK network and Janet as it was back in the day, probably still is, who knows. But they also, so they also are well respected or are well respected in education in the UK, as you know.
Neil Watkins
connectivity.
Yeah.
Hi.
And.
Kieron White
And they, we are going, they’ve asked if they can pilot knowledge flow. They had a test of it back in January. In fact, there was a group of them, slightly alarming time, frankly, because we gave them access to to knowledge flow. And that was their head of AI, their AI team, their, you know,
people that really know what they’re talking about and they gave it a good hard kicking and then we’re like, yeah, we think it’s really good and we’d love to pilot it. So that’ll be 10. We’re going to work with 10 institutions in HE and FE and we’re going to have give them each knowledge flow and the onboarding. And then at the end of a three month pilot, there’ll be an evaluation which JISC will lead. So
Neil Watkins
Nice.
Kieron White
I’m really excited. I mean, it’s mildly terrifying. But the webinar yesterday was great. We had lots of people come and we showed off both the tools for colleges and the tools for universities. And we had some a nice piece of feedback this morning from somebody that is
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Nice.
Kieron White
really well known in college land in AI, saying that she, one of her team had been and came back raving about it and said, we really want to be involved in this because it looks like a real step up from the stuff we’re doing. And they are respecting most people in colleges would point at this college and go, they are the people to go and ask about it.
So to have them see our stuff and go, that’s what we need is, yeah, quite an accolade. So yeah, that was exciting. Nice, a nice little cheery, cheery part. Well, let’s see what happens, but feels like a good.
Neil Watkins
Nuts.
Yeah, well, congratulations.
Yeah. Was there much difference between, because for our audience, as our audience knows, HENFE is not really my world, because I’m dealing with other parts, you’re dealing with the education piece, really. Was there much difference in the tools and things that you showed from university and college, or are there
Kieron White
Are you perpetuating?
Neil Watkins
because they see themselves as very different. Just whisper it, just whisper it, no one will hear, but they see themselves as very different.
Kieron White
Yeah, well, that’s what I was going to say. Yeah, I’ll whisper it to you. They do. And here’s the thing, because unis hate it if you say, yeah, we’re doing this for colleges and this is effectively the same tool just changed. You can’t, you have to be careful. So they want to feel like they’re very much the…
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
much more important than the college and very, very different, but are far more diligent and academic. No, they’re basically all the same, just different language. So like in college, they will do a thing called a SAR self-assessment review. We’ve got a great tool, as you know, that will crunch through all their data and effectively give them
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
that first draught of this is all the data that shows you’re doing well under this heading. This is the stuff that shows you’re not doing well and here’s gaps. I can’t find any data. And if you want, I’ll write a sort of summary paragraph of how you might write that in a SAR. The point being, all that time that you spend staring at stuff, searching documents, reading things and hoping that you’re going to take it all into your brain,
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
or you let AI do that bit, which is amazing at, way better than any of us will probably can ever be. And then you engage your brain on the kind of what does this mean? What can I do with that? I know that’s a problem, but we can now fix that because of this. Anyway, that’s the SAR. AMR is a thing called an annual monitoring review. You know where this is heading.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
It’s a load of data that you upload and you have to review and read and then you’ve got to reflect on and decide what’s going well and what isn’t and explain why based on the data. It’s identical. It’s just a different set of questions. Actually, they’re not very different set of questions either, frankly. But it’s yeah, and I could
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Mm.
Kieron White
Labour that on and on.
Neil Watkins
Come back to the point that we started this conversation some 20 minutes ago, speed of change. So 2 weeks ago, timetabling didn’t exist as a product. Did you show the timetabling tool?
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah, timetabling. I did show the timetabling tool very briefly. Yes, and it feels like timetabling is almost there, but then what’s hilarious about building is as soon as you, as soon as you kind of get to that, like that, there it is. Then another thing, so cold can of worms opens up and there’s so many things and we haven’t even, I mean, in many ways.
Neil Watkins
It’s always, always something.
Kieron White
We’ve got to a place where a university or a college can load some data about their room staff, courses, and it will produce a timetable for them that is compliant with everything they’ve sent, i.e. teachers teaching the subjects they teach, rooms not double booked, rooms that are allocated based on the requirements of the room, labs,
PCs, specialist equipment, staff working to the hours, etc, etc. But I think then is when all the kind of hard work starts, because that’s when Mrs Miggins goes, oh, you know, I hate teaching that class in that room. And all of those things that we need to accommodate.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kieron can’t teach in that room because the tension ever gets you lost 30 and his man ***** start sweating so he can’t teach in there.
Kieron White
Bringing it right back to the beginning. I see what you’re doing there.
I should tell you one more thing before we try and wrap up, which has interested me in my own behaviour. We talked about last week, we talked a bit about whether AI may be conscious or not. And the fact that it is probably beyond now just simply ruling that out and laughing it out of the room as at least worthy of a consideration, even if it is after three beers.
Neil Watkins
Oh
Yeah.
Kieron White
I am being much more polite to AI since reading that stuff. I please in nearly everything and thank you. So which adds a bit of tokens, but the worst thing you can do, as we’ve said before, is if you thank it for doing something, that’s bad because everything in the context window goes back to the LLM just to simply go, you’re welcome.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
But here’s the thing I also read, which was somewhere. It was a claude response. I think it was a behind the scenes claude response as opposed to the user, or maybe in the reasoning. It said, I’m doing this, blah, blah, blah, and the user has said, please, so I should search harder. There was some phrase, I’m not sure that was exactly the phrase, but it was
Neil Watkins
Interesting.
Kieron White
it recognised there was a please and because of that was going to do something additional, which is really intriguing. So, and maybe it’s coming full circle and to just simply that’s part of language and you know everything it’s read and knows about and sort of inferred in its own neural network is if someone’s polite, you should
Neil Watkins
Mhm.
Kieron White
probably work a bit harder to help them.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, it’s interesting because I think Julia probably wrote something about it about two years ago on the blog about actually if you put please in and it kind of it responds better.
Kieron White
Yeah.
It used to and then it stopped it. Jeopardy worked better for a while or just threatening it with or you telling it, my job’s on the line if I don’t get this right, it would improve the responses.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I am, and I remember it might have been your mate, Sam Altman, who you’ve been conversing with, saying something along the lines of it’s burning tokens, you don’t need to do this. And I think they changed it. And so it’s interesting that it’s come back around.
Kieron White
Sends me post.
But…
Yeah, exactly.
Neil Watkins
I read an article from some professor of AI at the university, I can’t remember which one it was in the UK, I’ll look it up, but who basically said, yeah, this nonsense, this consciousness and debate, it’s just absolutely rubbish. I was like, well, we should go to the pub with you and have a couple of conversations, a couple of beers in the chat. Well, maybe I should ask him, yes, maybe we should ask him.
Kieron White
Maybe we need him on as a guest.
Well, I would like, because you know, I hear that, I hear that, and I’ve met people that have been like, what ridiculous, and they kind of like almost totally dismissive. But I mean, I think any, I’m not sure he’s a professor and probably thought about it a bit, hopefully he’s got more than that’s rubbish. But you know, the reality is any point that someone makes should not be treated in that way, in my opinion, because it’s like,
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
Why, but secondly, I really I think there’s a there’s at least another two or three sentences required after why that’s nonsense.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah, you need to…
Kieron White
And you better be damn sure you know what consciousness is.
Neil Watkins
That’s right, you need. What’s the definition? Approve it. Very good.
Kieron White
Must it have a heartbeat or if it could be powered instead of blood and oxygen, it is electricity. Well, who’s to say?
Neil Watkins
indeed. Right, well, I know you’ve got a busy old day ahead of you. So good luck with all of that stuff. I’m going to be held hostage on the train network in super hot temperatures. So I’m going to hydrate thoroughly with relevant liquids. And I will catch you very soon. You have a good day.
Kieron White
Right.
Take that.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Good.
Good stuff, and you enjoy yourself wherever you go. Take care. Bye-bye.
Neil Watkins
Cheers, Matt. Bye.
Neil Watkins stopped transcription
