Daoud Clarke
Latest posts
Anthropic Abandoning Safety Commitments is a Bad Thing
I don’t think this is going to be particularly controversial, but I think Anthropic abandoning some of their commitments to safety is a Bad Thing™. To me, this was the distinguishing feature of their brand. This is what separated them from the OpenAIs and xAIs of this world. To be clear the commitment that they have dropped is a promise to not realease models without guaranteeing proper risk…
LLMs are Counterintuitive
I came across this paper where the authors evaluate coding agents ability to complete tasks with and without AGENTS.md files. The basic conclusion is that these files reduce success rates slightly, unless you are careful what you put in them. Basically make sure you only give instructions to the LLM that you are sure are going to be useful - as in, you have tried without the instruction and the…
Making LLMs More Efficient With Search Heads
It has always seemed a little crazy to me that LLMs are expected to re-learn how to do things that can be done trivially on a CPU. For example, it takes billions of FLOPS for an LLM to compute 2 + 2. While mathematics is definitely something I want to tackle in the future, I’ve started with something simpler that LLMs are expected to learn: how to copy sequences in the input string to the output.…
Comic Strip - 23rd February 2026
Thoughts on Standardizing Programming Languages
I’ve worked at a few places where there is a “standard” language. From an organisational perspective, this makes a lot of sense: if everyone writes the same language, then it’s easier to move developers (and code) around, which should lead to higher productivity. The downside is that developers tend to have preferences, and they may not like language X. If the company has had a policy of always…
Repeating Prompts
Someone at work shared an interesting paper from Google called Prompt Repetition Improves Non-Reasoning LLMs . The title pretty much sums up the paper, and the abstract is not much longer! The interesting thing for me is that this kind of trick is still possible despite the amount of work put into improving LLMs. To me, this proves how much room for improvement there still is for current LLMs. My…
Happy Ramadan / Lent 2026!
If you live in the UK, or another country that started fasting Ramadan today, you may not realise that today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of the traditional 40 days of Christian fasting, Lent. (Apparently the last time this happened was 1991, which is not as long ago as I thought it would be, probably because Easter moves around in a somewhat unpredictable pattern.) Unfortunately there are very…
Comic Strip - 18th February 2026
Learning to Draw
I wrote yesterday about some new things I’ve adopted this year. Another new thing for me is learning to draw. Although it’s not technically new because my mum is an artist so I drew a little when I was younger, but I felt like I never developed this skill to my full potential. More recently I’ve felt limited by my inability to draw, when I’ve considered starting projects that need that skill, like…
Trying New Things
Somebody asked me if I had a new year’s resolution recently, and while I don’t do new year’s resolutions, I had actually resolved something. I had resolved to try surfing. And I did, even in the freezing February Welsh sea. At almost the same time, I finally signed up for a theatre course. I now have about ten new friends and a hundred lines to memorize! Trying new things is hard. As a developer,…
Silent No Longer
Dear friends, I am constantly besieged by the feeling that I am not doing enough. A genocide is unfolding before our eyes . I feel the guilt with every mother holding a starving child , with every doctor killed , with every journalist murdered , with every child shot trying to get food . Last week I sat in the bathroom and cried for half an hour, overwhelmed with grief. If this were a tragedy…
Why the world needs a non-profit search engine
Sometimes I forget why I’ve taken on this crazy, huge task. Why am I building a search engine ? Will it really be better than Google one day? Will people support it? Will people even use it? And then I read something like The Bullshit Web and I remember, that, yes, there is a point. Even if I make the web better for one person, it’s worth it. Because the way things are is just wrong. Search…
Sonnet for Mum in Hospital
My love she lies alone, she cannot move And yet her spirit soars across the sky She’s held aloft by words enough to prove Sustainer’s breath can make a woman fly When I am gone I feel I’m still with you I leave a piece of me when I depart This truth - how could it not be true A part of you could never be apart What gift I have to give is given now What song I have to sing already sung You are the…
Everything you wanted to know about chatbot platforms, and some things you didn't
It’s quite overwhelming how many chatbot platforms there are. How should I know which one to choose? I created ChatbotTech to solve this problem. It’s a site that reviews and rates all* the chatbot platforms so you don’t have to. *some. In fact it’s quite hard to know which ones to review, there are so many. So far, I’ve opted for this strategy: if I see it, I put it on my list to review. If you…
Manifesto for an Intelligent Chatbot Platform
I’ve always found it frustrating that chatbot developers seem to be satisfied with frameworks that don’t even attempt to mimic anything close to real intelligence. There seem to be two basic approaches: Intent-based approaches, in which a query is mapped to a template, perhaps with some slots to be filled, for example, a query like “I need a train to Norwich” would prompt the chatbot to question…
Benefit People: Thinking Through Culture and Values
After watching Michael Skok’s excellent talk on Culture, Vision and Mission , I was tempted to have a bash at defining the values that I care about. Here’s my attempt. Benefit People Benefit as many people as much as possible. The best kind of benefit is that which helps people benefit people. Make it Easy Make everything easy. Everything is a conversation. Make conversations easy. Use simple…
My favourite ICML 2015 papers - part two
Yesterday I posted on my favourite papers from the beginning of ICML (some of those papers were actually presented today, although the posters were displayed yesterday). Here’s today’s update, which includes some papers to be presented tomorrow, because the posters were on display today… Neural Nets Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation Yaroslav Ganin, Victor Lempitsky Imagine you have…
My favourite papers from day one of ICML 2015
Aargh! How can I possibly keep all the amazing things I learnt at ICML today in my head?! Clearly I can’t. This is a list of pointers to my favourite papers from today, and why I think they are cool. This is mainly for my benefit, but you might like them too! Neural Nets / Deep Learning BilBOWA: Fast Bilingual Distributed Representations without Word Alignments Stephan Gouws, Yoshua Bengio, Greg…
So you want to be a data scientist? (Part 1)
“Data Scientist” is definitely the hot new job description. It is such a new title that the roles and responsibilities associated with it are still not clearly defined. What skills do you need to be a data scientist? Well, not everyone agrees. In this article we will try to be objective by looking at statistics on what skills employers recruiting data scientists are looking for. We will use data…
Hyperparameter - Data Science Training
Do you want to be a data scientist? Are you a data scientist looking to gain some new skills? I am very happy to announce the launch of Hyperparameter , my new company offering training for data scientists in London. Upcoming courses: Introduction to Python for Data Scientists (20th November 2014) Introduction to Machine Learning (21st November 2014) We also offer bespoke training courses to meet…
Fear
Did Fear betwixt the winters hide, In Autumn, donned his mangy hide, “Hail all, all’s well!” he ravenously cried. He lied. And now he darkens darkness skyed, And now the hands of cold untied, And now his hunger grows. With every stride They died. The mother begs a piece of bread; She claims the cold’s gone to his head. “Or maybe you could spare a quid instead,” She said. How art thou, banker, in…
17 Great Machine Learning Libraries
After wonderful feedback on my previous post on Scikit-learn from the guys at /r/MachineLearning , I decided to collect the list of machine learning libraries into this seperate note. Let me know if there’s a library that should be included here. Update (15 May 2014): thanks to Djalel Benbouzid and Dwayne Campbell for additional suggestions. Sorry it’s taken me so long to add them… Python…
Why I Love Scikit-learn
Scikit-learn is great because it has a clean API, is robust, fast, easy to use, comprehensive, and well documented and supported, released under a permissive license and the developers are cool. If you can implement your project in Python and you don’t need massively scalable algorithms, then it is probably for you. Choosing a library is often a crucial task. In the case of machine learning, it is…