David's Saturday AI Thoughts

Each Saturday, David Boyle reflects on what feels important in the world of AI. Not the breathless hype or the doom. The practical, analytical perspective: what happened this week, what it means for people who use language models in their work, and what to try next.David is Director of Audience Strategies and co-founder of Steadman. He advises organisations from L.E.K. Consulting to the BBC on AI adoption. This podcast is a spoken-word version of his Saturday AI Thoughts newsletter, with different voices for each section.

David's Saturday AI Thoughts is a technology podcast hosted by David Boyle, with 25 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

David Boyle hosts David's Saturday AI Thoughts, a technology show with 25 episodes published.

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  Episode #27

  One inch

  Aug 22, 202611 min

  An instructor moved David's hip about an inch in a hot yoga class and turned an easy pose very hard. That is the essay: there is no advanced room to graduate into, at yoga or with these tools, so the question four leaders asked him in one week, am I doing this well enough, cannot be answered by anyone including the people who are ahead. You cannot find your own inch. Also this week: Google buying a dead airline's entire working memory for about twenty dollars a worker, the market starting to discount the phrase because of AI, and a mathematician leaving the field because proofs got cheap and trust did not. Three things to try, including handing a model your own medical records and asking what they add up to.

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  Episode #26

  Go talk to them

  Aug 15, 20269 min

  The most common complaint David hears from senior leaders about AI is not about the technology at all. It is about what their own teams send them, and "that's just AI slop" has quietly become a way of avoiding a conversation about a person's work. His argument is that the CEO principle, checking, editing and owning every output, earns its keep less as quality control than as a permission slip: it gives you something to point at, so the awkward question stops being an accusation about someone's character. He watches one senior person do it well in a single line, then does it himself and gets two untrue claims owned rather than blamed on the machine. Then three things worth knowing: the law settling accountability ahead of other professions, the latest Generation 3 agent arriving so that every major lab now has one, and a booking system that met an agent which does not get bored. Plus three things to try, and what readers made of last week's AI colleague.

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  Episode #25

  My newest colleague

  Aug 8, 202612 min

  David introduces the colleague he has been running since New Year's Day: not the chatbot you visit or the agent you task, but a third kind that keeps a diary of a thousand entries, holds a handbook on how he works, and carries standing weekly duties, drafting replies it's never allowed to send. When a job needs more hands it briefs junior copies of itself, carrying his rules into every brief. None of this needed new technology, only management: boundaries set in advance, trust extended step by step. Then three things worth knowing: agents flooding Britain's courts and tribunals, a US court ruling on who's liable when software shops for you, and why rich economies are more exposed to AI than poor ones. Plus three things to try this week, and what readers made of last week's case that machines can smooth the road but can't choose the destination.

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  Episode #24

  Smooth enough

  Aug 1, 202612 min

  Cheap superhuman intelligence has arrived, and the strange part is how little changes: David's essay on why smoothing the work is not the same as changing the outcome. A leader's team stopped being the bottleneck and the results still didn't move, because the constraint had shifted from analysis to decisions. There's a trail in Connecticut, a tractor that sets the standard however good the tarmac, and the EMI story of halving research costs until the halvings stopped mattering. Then three things worth knowing: why AI winners and losers currently look identical, who has actually earned the right to stop reading the machine's work, and what happens now that checking everything costs less than sampling. Plus three tips you can use on Monday, and what readers are saying about AI ads, agent trust and the economics of insight.

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  Episode #23

  Burned and earned

  Jul 25, 202613 min

  A reader asked David: what is the environmental cost of all this AI? His instinct was to reassure, because a single prompt burns about a quarter of a watt-hour. Then he saw it was only half the story: the real cost isn't what the machine burned, it's what it burned minus whatever would otherwise have done the work. His model prices a prompt, a task and a whole day, and finds the energy a run costs is a floor, while the work it replaces is the ceiling, an order of magnitude higher. If a run replaced real work you came out ahead; if it replaced nothing, that's a decision you already make every day. The national total is still frightening, with data-centre power set to double by 2030. Be alarmed by the macro and use it anyway. Plus three things worth knowing, three things to try, and what readers said.

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