The rules shaping how AI can be used in regulated European industries are being written now – in data spaces, sector standards and the frameworks forming around the AI Act. For organisations in biopharma, medtech, manufacturing and insurance, that work will help define the conditions they work within. A key forum for that work is the BDVA - Big Data Value Association – an industry-led partnership of 250+ members that helps shape Europe's data and AI agenda, policy work, resea

Based in or near Cork? We’re looking for engineers who want to work on digital intelligence with Brightbeam. On Tuesday 9 June, we’re running a hiring day at Republic of Work. You’ll spend the day on a practical, self-contained digital intelligence project, close to the kind of work Brightbeam does with customers. You’ll have desk space, WiFi, lunch, tea, coffee and an Anthropic API key. Bring your laptop, charger and preferred development environment. We’re hiring across thr

Mammals dream because reality is slow. A rat that ran a maze yesterday may, that night, run the same maze again in its sleep – faster, in fragments, sometimes backwards. Neuroscientists first recorded hippocampal replay in rats in the 1990s. Later work showed just how strange it can get. The body is still. The learning isn't. Experience is something we live through, then replay, compress and recombine. Which is what some of the most capable AI systems do. AlphaGo Zero learned

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. Where the money rushed in, what it's building and who's being watched. tl;dr: What's in short supply? It's not the money. Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, making it the world's most valuable AI startup. But it's not the only AI-thing capital has been a-courting. China's troubled consumer funds turned tail to become tech stock-pick

Brightbeam remains bullish on Ireland's job prospects in the age of AI. But our tax base? That might be another question. There are two ways our corporation tax pipeline could be reduced by AI. The first one was outlined in the Irish Times this week. Digital Infrastructure Ireland, a lobby group for data centres, argues that if multinationals can't build them here, enterprise IP will migrate to other jurisdictions. And tax take will follow. The mechanic underneath: tax follow

We were asked again to comment on the AI-jobs debate, this time after yesterday's IMF warning that 40% of Irish jobs could be affected. Here's what we said: Impacting jobs is very different from destroying them. We're seeing a lot of work change - people doing different things than before, as they are augmented by AI. But working with large multinational clients in Ireland across biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance, we've yet to see the evidence of displa

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. What got said out loud, what got bought quietly and what got cut to pay for it. tl;dr: We thought the big guy was all-in. But then we discovered what he'd bought. On Thursday, we noted that Google AI supremo Demis Hassabis was all-in on world models. He framed Gemini Omni as the centrepiece of Google's year, as a digital intelligence that simulates physic

Many commentators are calling Google’s newly revealed AI path confusing. And underwhelming. But for those leaning in, it is anything but. The muted reaction is, perhaps, understandable. The models launched at Google I/O were catch-up not leap-ahead. The apps weren't ready. And Gemini Pro was punted to June. Then AI legend Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic the same day - drawing 25m+ views on X - and pulled considerable focus. It's also not usually great news when procurement i

Could smaller nations (still) use AI to unlock a new wave of economic growth? Which, given the growing disquiet about AI, feels like a tone deaf question to ask. But bear with. Until recently, we have expected everyone to have relatively cheap access to the very best models OpenAI, Anthropic and Google can offer. It's estimated that when you hand over your €20 for access, you receive up to €400 in usage. But as models have become larger, increasingly capable and more expensiv

Can the greatest engineers in Cork be found in a day? We think so. Tuesday 9th June is the first stop on the Brightbeam Talent Tour. An engineering recruitment day at Republic of Work – real digital intelligence chats, honest conversations – and hiring decisions made on the day. We're looking across three tracks: Engineers, Forward Deployed Engineers, Digital Intelligence Engineers – at Mid, Senior and Principal level. During the day you’ll work on a practical, self-contained

Baffled by its brilliance. Stunned by its stupidity. AI is intelligent, until it’s not. It can save you a week and then waste an afternoon. That’s why it needs harnesses, evals and constant supervision to do what you want reliably over time. It performs intelligence, but it does not reliably learn from experience. So for your Monday musing, we’re asking: What even is intelligence anyway? There are hundreds of possible definitions. But to name a few key ones: Prediction? Compr

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. The wins, the fails and the somewhere in-betweens. tl;dr: The public boos, the money cheers It's not been the best of weeks for Irish AI sentiment. Research revealed half of workers are expected to use AI without enough training. And the Irish Times argued women could be the losers in the workplace transition. This was in addition to the 720 Covalen worke

Is insurance finding its rhythm with AI? Last week, Marsh put ‘Project Leapfrog’ in front of selected clients - a tool for testing coverage and exposure scenarios. The world’s largest broker is using AI to compress actuarial and exposure analysis into an app clients can interrogate, live. And this isn’t the only signal that insurance’s rate of adoption has started to pick up the pace. Aviva has built 80+ AI models across claims, the result of a multi-year integration effort.

What should we make of Ireland's three AI-and-jobs stories this week? We've learned that 720 workers at Covalen have voted to strike - most of whom annotate and moderate content for Meta, which now wants its own AI to do the same work. LinkedIn also notified the government of further redundancies, although the company says the rationale is broader than AI. And Fórsa, Ireland's largest public-sector union, opened its conference today asking for an 'AI Time Dividend'. Which wou

Look at the size of mine! But is bigger necessarily better? In some contexts, a 100,000-token window beats a 32,000-token one, and a million-token window beats both. Subquadratic, a recently-launched startup, is claiming 12 million tokens and a thousandfold efficiency gain. But researchers are split on whether their claims are right. Headline numbers are doing the work they always do – the selling. But they mask the right way to think about context. Firstly, because greater s

Science progresses in bursts. And sometimes, especially given the intensity of the science-news cycle, interesting happenings make very little impact on the hypegeist. So this irregular series keeps you informed on what might otherwise go unnoticed at the intersection of science and its direct – or indirect – implications for AI. This month, three papers piqued our interest. And they reminded us that much of the compute we all use could be considered over-engineered. Silicon

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. The wins, the fails and the somewhere in-betweens. tl;dr: Professional doom mongering is out of fashion. Say it quietly, because AI dooming is almost deafening in popular circles. But it might actually be tapering off among commentators, as various forces pull attitudes in the opposite direction. An Ezra Klein essay, argued the AI job apocalypse is struct

A clinician gets an alert: a patient may be septic. But how certain is the AI that just pinged his phone? Most daily users might agree that AIs are not yet adept at calibrating their uncertainty. And an agent that can't tell you when it's sure - or when it's guessing - needs far more supervision. Especially in a hospital, an underwriting team, a pharmacovigilance unit or a trading floor. So, as systems evolve, where should the calibration for certainty live? The default assum

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. The wins, the fails and the somewhere in-betweens. tl;dr: we can see clearly now With so much moving so quickly, only the brave or naive call something 'a trend' in the universe of AI. A data series - describing adoption, competitive positioning or value - may appear robust one week. Only for it to be revealed as an ephemeral wisp or blip the next. But th

To many, AI adoption in life sciences looks like a technology problem. It mostly isn't. The capability is largely there. To others, it looks like a regulatory problem. Yet regulators have signalled openness in principle. So some are calling it a capability problem. But the same organisations that have built validated digital infrastructure for decades aren't suddenly incapable. So - what is it? Well, in an unregulated industry, a business with conviction and capital just move

Designing the human system around AI The case for AI at the task level is, we may now reasonably argue, beyond dispute. Research reveals that customer support agents resolve 14% more issues per hour. Junior consultants complete tasks 25% faster - and at higher quality. Power users compress what used to be weeks of work into hours. However, the case at the organisational level is altogether muddier. A National Bureau of Economic Research survey of nearly 6,000 executives acro

Nevermind whether AI is conscious. What changes the day after Anthropic or OpenAI says it is? What will their enterprise contracts include then? And will we use those AI models differently? More carefully? More sensitively? Or will we not? Because, we reason, the cost to them is smaller than the benefit to us? Given small cruelties may abound, how quickly will the AI Act be updated? Will it flip to balance the rights and obligations of both user and used? Which highlights ano

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. The wins, the fails and the somewhere in-betweens. tl;dr: Everyone's delegating now For 18 months, all the Big Tech Bros have been telling us that agents are genuine assistants, capable of autonomous work. 'Fire them up, let them go!' For 17.75 months - especially non-developers - that's pretty much been a lie. Albeit of ever-decreasing proportions. But,

A developer pins their workflow to a stable version of a closed-API model. They change nothing. Not the prompt. Not the pipeline. Not the evaluation set. Six months later, success rate has dropped from roughly nine out of ten to roughly six out of ten. There is no changelog, no deprecation notice, no visible model-version change. The pin is still in. That is the drift problem in its most operational form. The model name is pinned. The endpoint is pinned. The inputs are unchan