INDEPENDENT RESEARCH / PRACTICE NOTES

Ideas in motion, not ideas behind glass.¶

This is my working notebook on AI engineering, strategy, knowledge infrastructure, organizational transformation, and the human systems that determine whether innovation becomes real capability.

The notes range from emerging research questions to practical operating models. Some will become papers, tools, talks, or products. Others are here because thinking improves when it is made visible.

Evidence before theater Systems over slogans Useful, accountable AI

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Latest writing

March 30, 2023
in AI Governance, Knowledge Strategy, Organizational Learning
3 min read

A framework needs a community of practice

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has launched its Trustworthy and Responsible Artificial Intelligence Resource Center, known as the Artificial Intelligence Resource Center (AIRC). The new site gathers the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF), its playbook, crosswalks, and implementation resources in one place.

Central access is useful. The larger opportunity is to create a place where organizations learn how the framework behaves in practice.

March 23, 2023
in AI Security, Human-Centered AI, Enterprise Architecture
3 min read

Tool-using AI needs explicit authority

OpenAI has begun introducing plugins that let ChatGPT retrieve current information, run computations, and interact with external services. The early examples include browsing, code execution, travel, shopping, and other application connections.

This changes the nature of the system. A model that produces text can mislead. A model connected to tools can also act.

March 14, 2023
in AI Assurance, Risk Management, Product Management
3 min read

GPT-4 raises the standard for deployment evidence

OpenAI has released Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4), a multimodal model that accepts image and text inputs and produces text. The accompanying technical report and system card describe strong performance across professional and academic benchmarks, alongside familiar limitations: unreliable facts, reasoning errors, bias, and behavior that can be difficult to characterize completely.

The release offers more than a new capability. It offers a useful distinction between evidence about a model and assurance about a deployed system.

March 6, 2023
in Human-Centered AI, Knowledge Strategy, Operating Models
3 min read

Copilots will rewire the handoff

Microsoft has introduced generative artificial intelligence capabilities across Dynamics 365, bringing “copilot” functions into sales, customer service, marketing, and supply-chain work. The examples emphasize drafting emails, summarizing interactions, creating content, and surfacing information inside the applications where people already work.

The most important design question is not how much text a copilot can generate. It is what happens to the handoff.

March 1, 2023
in AI Strategy, Platform Engineering, Risk Management
3 min read

An API turns a model into an organizational dependency

OpenAI has made ChatGPT and Whisper available through application programming interfaces (APIs). Developers can now add conversational language and speech-to-text capabilities to products without training or hosting the underlying models. The lower cost and simpler integration will accelerate experimentation.

It will also make a third-party model part of more organizations' operating machinery.

February 23, 2023
in Cybersecurity, Digital Engineering, Knowledge Strategy
3 min read

A digital twin can preserve operational judgment

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is exploring how digital twins could help manufacturers detect cyberattacks. By comparing a physical process with its virtual representation, a team may recognize changes that ordinary information-technology monitoring misses: a machine behaving differently, a process drifting, or a control command producing an unexpected physical result.

The cybersecurity potential is important. So is the knowledge-management lesson. A useful digital twin does not merely mirror equipment. It preserves an organization's understanding of what normal operation means.

February 16, 2023
in AI Governance, Human-Centered AI, Product Management
3 min read

Model behavior is an organizational decision

OpenAI has published a useful account of a difficult problem: how should a conversational artificial intelligence system behave, and who should decide? The company describes tensions among default behavior, user customization, safety boundaries, and the wide range of values held by people who use the system.

The question is often framed as model alignment. For organizations deploying these systems, it is also product governance. Every default encodes a decision about authority, acceptable variation, and whose judgment applies when values conflict.

February 7, 2023
in Human-Centered AI, Knowledge Strategy, Decision Support
3 min read

Search has become a knowledge-verification problem

Microsoft has introduced a new version of Bing that combines search with a conversational artificial intelligence system. Instead of returning only a ranked list of links, it can synthesize an answer, respond to follow-up questions, and show sources alongside the conversation.

This interface is convenient because it compresses the distance between a question and a usable explanation. It is risky for exactly the same reason.