David Stephenson PhD

Data Strategy Consultant, Author, Trainer
Professor Univ. of Amsterdam, Chair PAW UK
Linkedin:

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

When my book is sold-out on Amazon (which usually happens after I speak at a conference), you can generally still find copies at https://t.co/x2cdLf7KHw.

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

Suffering is a perfectly natural part of getting a neural network to work well, but it can be mitigated by being thorough, defensive, paranoid, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐛𝐬𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠. -Karpathy

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

Starbucks ditches AI inventory system after just 9 months | Restaurant Dive https://t.co/fobFQQRQwf

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

Also applies to exams I've graded.
'slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time'. -schwarzgerat.bsky.social

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

"The amount of value people are unlocking right now by throwing caution to the wind is hard to ignore, though."
-Simon Willison on Moltbot

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

'Writing code is not the challenge anymore. Suddenly, the new bottleneck is how are you verifying all that code' - Johannes dahse

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

'My own interest in MCPs has waned ever since I started taking coding agents seriously. Almost everything I might achieve with an MCP can be handled by a CLI tool instead.' - Simon Willison

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

America’s top companies keep talking about AI — but can’t explain the upsides - https://t.co/bngXv9yY6K via @FT

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

"I strongly expect that the entire concept of an agentic browser extension is fatally flawed and cannot be built safely." -Simon WIllison

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

Finally started uploading my talk on 'Essential Business Skills for Analytic Professionals'.
Here is part 1 https://t.co/rrulcXbReR

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

Capital expenditures on AI data centers is likely around 20% of the peak spending on railroads, as a percentage of GDP, and it is still rising quickly.
https://t.co/4mcp69zHL8

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

remember when people couldn't stop talking about the growth of #IOT? https://t.co/PouwdU3X1x

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

Just getting around to reading the July 9th edition of The Batch. Wish they'd do grammar checks and improve readability.

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

Hard to believe

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

Quote from WSJ article "Johnson & Johnson Pivots Its AI Strategy":
And as the company tracked the broad value of AI, including generative AI, data science and intelligent automation, it found that only 10% to 15% of use cases were driving about 80% of the value,

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

After years of stressing out the industry, Google is actually not going to eliminate 3rd party cookies.

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

It's just dawned on me that Simon Willison's newsletter is actually sent several times per week, rather than weekly, and now I understand why I'm struggling so hard to keep up with my professional learning emails.

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

https://t.co/6XPl91yBy4

[Hamel Husain @HamelHusain]

LLM bullshit knife, to cut through bs

RAG -> Provide relevant context
Agentic -> Function calls that work
CoT -> Prompt model to think/plan
FewShot -> Add examples
PromptEng -> Someone w/good written comm skills.
Prompt Optimizer -> For loop to find best examples.

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

Here's a new emergent risk. Apparently you can jailbreak an LLM by slipping a banned term in using ASCII art.
https://t.co/vyStqyv9RU

[David Stephenson PhD @Stephenson_Data]

https://t.co/pfOCxCqPMS