Aidan Kelly

Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025) Why I'm moderately bearish in the short term, and explosively bullish in the long term

Thoughtful piece by my current favourite podcaster @dwarkesh.bsky.social on where we're at with AI progress and reflections around intelligence itself: substack.com/home/post/p-...

Yann LeCun being let go by Meta might have some unexpected benefits 🍿

This may be very old man of me, but I feel like there is something about the bluesky algorithm/my feed that is not sucking me in enough. I know, I know, it's sort of the point but still, I need to have some pull to check out the content and it isn't quite itching that scratch.

With the AWS outage, now‘s as good a time as any to post this old strip.

Mission Radar: emerging trends and signals in affordable low-carbon heating Innovations to improve the affordability of low-carbon heating

Link to the article piece: www.nesta.org.uk/feature/miss...

🏛️ Policy trends:
Electricity price reduction is climbing the policy agenda. Recent debate has centred on long-term ways to bring down prices for households and businesses. That’s key to helping heat pumps compete with gas boilers on running costs. (7/7)

This combined heat pumps, community energy storage, EV car clubs and solar panels to cut bills and upfront costs. (6/7)

🔬 Research funding:
UK research has shifted from optimising heat pumps to green finance, mirroring the investment trend.

Example: Rossendale Borough Council received over £2 million for a place-based decarbonisation demonstrator in terraced streets. (5/7)

IKEA: Meatballs, flat-packs and now heat pumps. The company is now offering heat pumps in several European countries, including the UK since late September, through partnerships with manufacturers such as Aira. (4/7)

💡 Venture funding:
Finance for low-carbon heating is getting a green light from investors. Global investment in 2025 rose sharply for businesses offering loans and financial products to support uptake. (3/7)

In this edition, we looked at innovations to make low-carbon heating more affordable, a key barrier in our mission to decarbonise home heating in the UK. (2/7)

Mission Radar chart (a type of bubble chart) for Nesta's "A sustainable future" mission, updated Q2 2025. The radar is divided into four quadrants representing categories of innovation: "Ventures and investments" (top right), "Research funding" (bottom right), "Policy" (bottom left), and an unlabeled top-left quadrant (representing trends that are not primarily investment, funding, or policy). A dashed vertical line separates signals in the "Policy" and unlabeled quadrant from those in "Ventures and investments" and "Research funding." Blips are positioned based on time to expected impact, from the center outwards: "0-2 years," "3-5 years," and "5+ years." Blip size indicates potential impact on home decarbonisation, with larger blips signifying greater expected impact and smaller blips signifying smaller or more niche impact. Main Trends and Findings (Blips): Venture and Investment (High Impact, Short/Medium Term): Ikea heat pumps (Small, 0-2 years) Digital platform for local installers (Medium, 0-2 years) Energy-as-a-service (Small, 0-2 years) Retail investment in green finance ventures (Medium, 3-5 years) Research Funding (Medium Impact, Short/Medium Term): Turbo air-source heat pump (Medium, 0-2 years) Net zero terrace streets (Medium, 3-5 years) Community operated energy infrastructure (Small, 3-5 years) Policy (Medium/High Impact, Short Term): Increased government publications on electricity prices (Medium, 0-2 years) Increased references to electricity prices in debates (Small, 0-2 years) Top-Left Quadrant (High Impact, Medium Term): One large, dark blip is visible in the 3-5 years range. Source: Nesta's analysis of innovation trends. Companies and research projects included are those identified in Q2 2025. Blip size and positioning determined by expert judgement.

Happy to share my first piece of analysis work with the Discovery team at @nestauk.bsky.social on 𝗠𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗥𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗿!

The Mission Radar is a briefing series on innovation signals and emerging trends in Nesta’s missions. We use AI to scan for innovation across business, academia and policy. (1/7)

YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”

What a really interesting conversation between two of my favourite people in AI in the form of @karpathy.bsky.social and @dwarkesh.bsky.social. I wish more ppl in this space took the same approach in terms of being open to debate, challenge and overall being humble.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXUZ...

Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the...

The author doesn't really address the wider implications of deterministic LLMs, but can imagine the reproducibility of outputs could be very powerful in terms of trust.

Link to the blog: thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeati...

(6/6)

Used ChatGPT in study and think mode as well as prompting it to use socratic questioning to really improve my understanding of this area. (5/6)

They've managed to create deterministic LLMs at inference time with some penalties for efficiency, but the results are pretty cool. I found their blog quite a long read, as I had little familiarity around the intricacies of these calculations and how they relate to GPUs. (4/6)

However there are different strategies to get around this, e.g. running sums over single cores in a GPU. This is what 'Thinking Machines' have been doing with implementing batch-invariant calculations for LLMs. (3/6)

This is caused by something called floating point non-associativity. In Maths, we can do (a+b)+c =a+(b+c) but this is not the case when doing calculations in computers, the order matters. (2/6)

So theoretically LLMs can be deterministic if we set their temperature to zero, but in practice they aren't. This comes down to how we do calculations such as matrix multiplication at inference time. It turns out the order you do these calculations in does matter. (1/6)

Does anyone have cool (or boring) agentic use-cases that they've read about or used?

Doing some horizon scanning work to see what's out there but thought my bluesky network might have ideas!

Harnessing AI to positively disrupt policymaking Lessons learned from our user research

That's what we are building with Nesta's Policy Atlas tool!

Read about our alpha tool user testing and what's next for the project, here: www.nesta.org.uk/project-upda... (2/2)

What if there was an AI-powered tool that allowed policymakers to rapidly identify the most effective policies to tackle any given social challenge, based on the latest evidence? (1/2)

This was a fun ML problem to tackle, underlined some of the data quality issues with EPCs (92% of the storey count field was missing) 😅.

Think the conclusion around the distinct heating strategies needed for areas with different rise types is definitely a salient one!

Favourite feature from the GPT-5 release is being able to quickly spin out different UIs (which can be previewed), make easy edits without needing to manually edit JS code myself. It's pretty good at instruction following now too!

YouTube video by Toto Cutugno - Topic L'italiano

Some Friday evening listening a l'italiano 🇮🇹: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL1s...

OpenAIs graphs against humanity for their release of GPT-5 is just *chefs kiss*. We've achieved PhD level intelligence but watch us make graphs where 50 < 47

What a ridiculous state of affairs. Terence Tao one of the greatest mathematicians of his generation getting his grants suspended 💩

Brilliant news and about time!

Build a Career in Data Science Podcast · Jacqueline Nolis and Emily Robinson · Build a Career in Data Science teaches you what data science courses leave out: from how to land your first job to the lifecycle of a data science proje...

Listened to the "build a career in data science" whilst making the transition from academia to data science. Found it an extremely useful resource and would recommend to anyone starting out on their journey. Even now I've been relistening and still v relevant: open.spotify.com/show/78Nft51...

Estimation of energy efficiency of heat pumps in residential buildings using real operation data - Nature Communications Heat pumps are essential for sustainable heating, but their performance varies widely. Here, authors analyze data from 1023 systems, revealing that 17% of air-source and 2% of ground-source heat pumps...

Plot taken from this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... (2/2)