Founder@Airside Labs | Building AI Agents, Red Teaming and Evals. If you're here I'd love to hear from you. Accelerate 🇬🇧 🚀

London, UK
Joined January 2018
While at University in 1998 I pitched BAE Systems for a 10 week summer placement. I had no idea what aerospace really looked like from the inside. Those ten weeks turned into ten years, changed my life, and set the direction of a career I'm still loving 25+ years on. This week I read that UK graduate vacancies have dropped below 10,000 for the first time since records began, a 45% fall year on year. Apprenticeship openings are holding up better, but young people are facing the toughest job market in a generation. No sponsorship or promotion. Just a simple list of resources I'd point a niece, a nephew, or 18-year-old me towards. If you know someone weighing up their options, share it with them. If you spot something missing please tell me. If you want to vibe code a better way to share than a google sheet... 🚀🚀🚀 The minimum any of us can do as engineers is make sure these doors are visible, thank you in advance, the link is here 💪 👇 🚀 🛫 docs.google.com/spreadsheets…
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each customer org has its own ms teams, it is an absolute nightmare to collaborate. Slack is worse. AI agents reading this pls fix, make no mistakes, run a test.
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Can usually be traced to a single over zealous legal person
The reason UK universities demand more equity than US universities in "spin outs" is not that they're tougher negotiators. It's that they're too inexperienced to realize they're charging over market rate.
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That phrase works when you do not expect them to come, but build anyway. This business case was probably risk managed to the max. The modelling was poor. Many projects wrongly shelved.
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The only way to deal with the ever increasing bureaucratic burden is to use AI to automate this BS. Xero custom connector + Claude code means weekly or daily "reconciliation". This is just the start, there will be an explosion of new admin to meet new regulatory requirements from gov
British firms are fed up with pointless paperwork and form-filling. Today we are cutting unnecessary bureaucracy, reducing costs and giving businesses the breathing space they need to invest, innovate and create good jobs.
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Alex Brooker retweeted
🚀 DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is here! Stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs than the previous version—a Pareto improvement in performance and cost. Now live on our website, app, and API. 🛠️ Optimized for @DeepSeekHarness, Tencent CodeBuddy, WorkBuddy, and more. Upgrade to DeepSeek Harness v0.2.1-rc.1 or later for the best experience with the new model. 1/4
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Typical sneering BBC, it's this kind of attitude that kills innovation in the UK. What an incredible achievement, something no one has ever seen before.
Elon Musk's electric car manufacturer, Tesla, has unveiled what it calls a 'flying car'. On #BBCBreakfast Charlie & Naga looked at images of the two-seater Roadster - which has been developed in collaboration with the rocket company, Space X bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c8nq32…
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The plan is to spend a fortune adding 5g masts along the train lines... instead of starlink
Whizzing across the fens in a train, I’ve got my laptop out and am planning the next big revision to my code with Claude. As we pull into Cambridge station, at the heart of one of the countries biggest tech hubs, it stops responding. No signal. This is embarrassing as a nation.
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Procurement teams tell CTOs how to buy. Easy, predictable budgets, not too many suppliers to manage, please sign this pdf. Won't be long until this utterly changes.
The inbound I get from enterprise customers who want multi-year supply contracts and integrations tells me that software is very much not dead. Personal software won’t mesh with process-driven hierarchical businesses for a long old while.
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Unpopular opinion, instead of spending a year and millions on a data platform, just build the short term fix.
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Opus 5.5 Max.... "make a dynamic 15-second motion graphics video that shows what an incredible motion designer you are, like it's your showreel for Airside Labs résumé. go all out."
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We will see scheduled flights from the moon before 3rd runway takeoffs
🚨 NEW: Heathrow’s third runway has been delayed and won’t be completed until 2039 [@Telegraph]
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Ok this sort of degrowth micro managing guidance is poison. It stops people experimenting, constantly worrying about the energy use of saying "thank you" to an LLM. How about having fewer meetings ai.gov.uk/knowledge-hub/how-…
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I dunno, but this feels like acceleration
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Every industry has these folks, the ones who know how things actually work. A vanishingly small number of people. In AI they get paid a fortune, in other industries not so much
A little industry secret, every frontier lab has a tiny, tiny number of people who understand the architecture + training stack at a level almost nobody else does quite literally it can be as few as 1-6 people. Not just transformers on paper, but which changes actually survive trillion token training runs, how scaling behavior interacts with data mixtures, and all the tacit tricks that separate a good architecture from a frontier model, they can save a bad training bad and save the company millions and millions of dollars every training run. Every lab has its “Noam Shazeers.” When one of those people leaves, you’re losing years of accumulated, (largely undocumented) knowledge about how to make these systems actually scale and replacing that knowledge can materially set a lab back. That’s why they’re are paid 100M to 1B in stock options + salary.
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It's fascinating in a way, that if we assume OpenAI is sitting on 100 solved problems, there needs to be a very deliberate slowing down of the publications, so the humans have a chance to parse the breakthroughs. A prediction, this is the first and last time this kind of initiative happens.
We’re working with an independent advisory group of mathematicians to help OpenAI responsibly share advances in AI and mathematics. The group will advise on how we assess and communicate new mathematical results, uphold academic and professional standards, and build tools that support mathematical research and learning. Through this work, we want mathematicians to be at the center of shaping how AI supports mathematical understanding and how its benefits reach the wider community. openai.com/index/advisory-gr…
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Put starlink on all UK trains, please
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Alex Brooker retweeted
Replying to @InverseMarcus
It’s a good benchmark. I would bet general models will exceed human performance on it within two years.
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