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"How beauteous mankind is", says Miranda of Shakespeare's Tempest prefaces our title, and in our own tempestuous times we say, "Chat, how many r's in 'strawberrry'?"
Not quite the same romance, but this is the windswept island we are given, and one that, despite AI hallucinations coming and going, seems to have powers to equal that of Prospero.
We at Aithnography exist to probe this magic and retain our humanity in so doing. We are a design studio, a quixotic research group, AI consultants, builders of tools using AI and for AI but most of all for humans.
Humans like my logic and Shakespeare students, my children learning their multiplication tables and beyond, our friends of various vastly different industries who now have to grapple with the dark forking paths of the software development lifecycle as they build personal tools, workflow enablers in their small businesses, and applications of the scale that previously resisted disruption and sat unchallenged the realm of giant lethargic corporate leviathans.
We are the dreamers of the dream thousands of hours deep in the matmuls* and the token-spend and grown weary of being swept along by corporate inevitability and here to make AI clear and powerful and personal.
Once again with less romance-- aithnography's first engagements are advising a select list of startups in using AI to do software and implementing AI features in thoughtful measurable ways within these products, but follow along as we clarify AI for humans slop-free and largely gratis.
1. What are "matmuls"? Matrix multiplication, once in heavy use in only a few select fields like complex financial engineering and graphics, is now the star of the LLM inference computing paradigm. A matrix is a square of numbers that, thanks to linear algebra and the GPU, graphical processing unit, can do calculations solving equations that would take 1000s of times longer on old CPUs and without the growing bag of tricks that sent AI usage parabolic starting soon after the mass psychosis of 2020. We say "box of numbers", but the size and dimensionality and popularity of these boxes (hybercubes, tesseracts, quirky manifolds, if you will) has grown with every increasingly frequent frontier model release, though public understanding of their true nature has barely budged.