6 May 2026Elon Vs OpenAI 2, Gamestop’s Half Cash Half Stock, Tech Gala, Pints Hit £10
Tom Ough (UnHerd): The Death of Ask Jeeves & UK AI Optimism
Tom Ough, editor at UnHerd and co-host of its futurism podcast, explains his piece on the shutdown of Ask Jeeves, reading the valet mascot's demise as a parable for Britain's shrinking soft power and an internet increasingly designed for users with no cultural context. They weigh naming a future UK frontier lab 'Jeeves', assess the UK's £500 million AI funding and the influx of AI labs to London, and Tom flags headwinds like expensive industrial energy, a bloated state, and the UK's abandoned vertical-launch program.
Matt Pocock: The Dictionary of AI Coding
Developer educator Matt Pocock joins for a surprise 'mystery AI talk': his Dictionary of AI Coding GitHub repo, which spells out 61 terms in plain English and draws the key line between a model, its harness, the environment, and an agent. He argues shared vocabulary combats both fear-driven anti-AI sentiment (citing the Sebastian Mallaby 'one in three Americans fear AI' stat) and day-to-day collaboration, applying domain-driven design's 'ubiquitous language' concept and demonstrating his dictation-based 'grill me' workflow for nailing down language before building. On tools, he uses Claude Code but stays agnostic (likely to try Codex), says open-source models aren't yet cutting it for state-of-the-art coding, and offers newcomers a starter pack: read the dictionary, pay for a frontier model, and notice how much of your job is text-in, text-out. Asked about the future of work, he declines to speculate — 'I am a teacher, not a pundit' — noting AI is already very good and the knowledge gap is what he's trying to fill.