Embedded AI - Intelligence at the Deep Edge

David Such

“Intelligence at the Deep Edge” is a podcast exploring the fascinating intersection of embedded systems and artificial intelligence. Dive into the world of cutting-edge technology as we discuss how AI is revolutionizing edge devices, enabling smarter sensors, efficient machine learning models, and real-time decision-making at the edge. Discover more on Embedded AI (https://medium.com/embedded-ai) — our companion publication where we detail the ideas, projects, and breakthroughs featured on the podcast. Help support the podcast - https://www.buzzsprout.com/2429696/support

  1. 4d ago

    The Intellectual Event Horizon: Can an AI Model Know What Nobody Taught It?

    Send us Fan Mail On 20 May 2026, an unreleased OpenAI model produced a counterexample to a conjecture Paul Erdős made in 1946. Nine world-class mathematicians reviewed the construction and found it sound. On 8 September, ten thousand agents working for 88 hours produced a singularity in the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations, formally verified in Lean, resolving a Millennium Prize problem. Neither result was in any training corpus, because neither existed. This episode asks what actually happened. If a model generates a proposition that was never in its training data, is that discovery or hallucination? The uncomfortable answer is that at the moment of generation they are the same operation. Nothing in the sampling process distinguishes a true novel claim from a false one. The partition is imposed afterwards, from outside, by a verifier the model does not run. We work through the 2026 evidence on both sides. Yan and colleagues at ACL measured the unverifiable output space across 32,400 generations and found that only 4.7 percent of it qualifies as creative synthesis rather than groundless fabrication. Kalai and colleagues at OpenAI argue that models hallucinate because training rewards guessing over admitting uncertainty, which means the disposition to conjecture is optimised for rather than accidental. Meanwhile the computability literature argues that some irreducible error rate is mathematically necessary for any model family we can actually build. The conclusion is that the ceiling on machine knowledge is not the training corpus. Every confirmed case of machine-originated knowledge this year paired a generative model with a verifier that was not a language model: a proof assistant, a code executor, a cell viability assay. The generator supplies variation and something outside it supplies selection, which is the structure of evolution by natural selection. That makes the event horizon domain-shaped rather than knowledge-shaped. Mathematics has a perfect verifier and is falling quickly. Fields without a verifier will not move by this route, regardless of how important they are. This episode is a sequel to "Large Language Monkeys: Why Noise Yields No Knowledge" (S6E7), which argued that a random source contains no knowledge because nothing selects the signal. Here we ask what happens when a selector exists. Referenced in this episode: Quanta Magazine on the Erdős problems and on Navier-Stokes; Yan et al., ACL 2026; Kalai, Nachum, Vempala and Zhang, arXiv 2509.04664; AlphaEvolve and FunSearch; Shumailov et al., Nature 2024 on model collapse. Discover more on Embedded AI (https://medium.com/embedded-ai), our companion publication. Support the show If you are interested in learning more then please subscribe to the podcast or head over to https://medium.com/@reefwing, where there is lots more content on AI, IoT, robotics, drones, and development. To support us in bringing you this material, you can buy me a coffee or just provide feedback. We love feedback!

    The Intellectual Event Horizon: Can an AI Model Know What Nobody Taught It?

  2. Sep 5

    Why Businesses Don't Automate

    Send us Fan Mail A large paint company documents four ways to process a purchase order. In reality there are 11,973 different approaches. That gap between the documented process and the real one is the subject of this episode, and it explains why AI adoption is near universal while the share of companies reporting any profit impact has been flat at 37 percent for two years. We look at where the difficulty actually sits. The process lives in workarounds, spreadsheets and people's heads, and is different at every site. The data is spread across roughly 900 applications of which a quarter are connected. Legacy systems were never designed to be called by a machine. And the law has started to way in: Air Canada was held liable for what its chatbot said, Workday can be sued as an employer's agent, Australian companies must disclose automated decisions from December 2026, and Commonwealth Bank reversed AI-attributed redundancies after call volumes went up rather than down. We then cover what AI adds to the old problem. Language models are non-deterministic and cannot be replayed for audit. The best agents complete about 30 percent of realistic office tasks. Human oversight runs into limits Lisanne Bainbridge described in 1983, now measured in the field. And people feel faster while being measurably slower. Finally, what works. The strongest predictor of financial return is not the model but whether the workflow was redesigned, which is the same lesson factories took forty years to learn from electrification. We walk through the method: mine the process, standardise the core, exclude the tail explicitly, run in shadow mode against a baseline, measure at the process level, and tier governance by consequence. Support the show If you are interested in learning more then please subscribe to the podcast or head over to https://medium.com/@reefwing, where there is lots more content on AI, IoT, robotics, drones, and development. To support us in bringing you this material, you can buy me a coffee or just provide feedback. We love feedback!

    Why Businesses Don't Automate

  3. Aug 28

    Large Language Monkeys: Why Noise Yields No Knowledge

    Send us Fan Mail There is an old claim that a truly random source contains all knowledge: give monkeys enough time at typewriters and Shakespeare falls out. In 2024 two Sydney mathematicians did the arithmetic and found the universe ends first. But the idea has a modern tail. We now have language models that can spot meaningful text instantly, so why not let randomness generate and an LLM extract? This episode works through why that fails, and why the failure is precise: in a random stream, the address of any text costs as many bits as the text itself. Along the way: Borges' Library of Babel, a website that actually built it, DeepMind systems that made the generate-and-filter idea work by cheating in exactly the right way, and what your brain does with noise that an LLM cannot. Support the show If you are interested in learning more then please subscribe to the podcast or head over to https://medium.com/@reefwing, where there is lots more content on AI, IoT, robotics, drones, and development. To support us in bringing you this material, you can buy me a coffee or just provide feedback. We love feedback!

    Large Language Monkeys: Why Noise Yields No Knowledge

  4. Aug 23

    Great Minds Think (a Little Too Much) Alike

    Send us Fan Mail Anthropic gave thirty AI agents the same coding task. Eighteen of them named their git branch exactly the same thing. That result opens one of the strangest findings of 2026: when teams of AI agents face the classic "hidden profile" experiment, where the shared evidence points to the wrong answer and the decisive facts are scattered across individuals, they succeed only 17 to 36 percent of the time. Human groups in the original 1985 study? 18 percent. Forty years, a completely different kind of mind, the same failure. In this episode we dig into why. We trace the mathematics of groupthink from information cascades to Condorcet juries, then follow the trail into territory embedded engineers know well: the 1986 Knight and Leveson experiment that shattered the independence assumption in N-version software, Airbus's dissimilar redundancy, and the Lufthansa flight where two frozen sensors outvoted the one telling the truth. Along the way, honeybees show us a working reference design: a two-milligram brain that refuses to repeat a rumor. We close with the fixes: engineered dissenters, forced disclosure protocols, reputation infrastructure for agents, and the case for "keeping the weirdness alive" through a genuinely diverse AI ecosystem, including heterogeneous fleets of small models at the edge. Key sources: Anthropic's "Patterns and problems in emerging multiagent systems," Rohit Krishnan's "LLM councils show groupthink," and Thinking Machines' "The Future Worth Building Is Human." Support the show If you are interested in learning more then please subscribe to the podcast or head over to https://medium.com/@reefwing, where there is lots more content on AI, IoT, robotics, drones, and development. To support us in bringing you this material, you can buy me a coffee or just provide feedback. We love feedback!

    Great Minds Think (a Little Too Much) Alike

  5. Aug 18

    Purpose as a Service

    Send us Fan Mail What happens when work no longer gives our lives structure, identity, or meaning? This episode explores “Purpose as a Service”—the idea that purpose could be intentionally designed and delivered in an age of mass automation. We examine the decline of traditional anchors such as employment, religion, and community; the rise of wellness programs, professional coaching, and AI companions; and what universal basic income trials reveal about the limits of financial security. Can external services genuinely help people build fulfilling lives, or does true purpose depend on personal agency and authorship? Consider this a blueprint for one of humanity’s biggest future challenges: learning how to live well when a job is no longer at the center of life. Support the show If you are interested in learning more then please subscribe to the podcast or head over to https://medium.com/@reefwing, where there is lots more content on AI, IoT, robotics, drones, and development. To support us in bringing you this material, you can buy me a coffee or just provide feedback. We love feedback!

    Purpose as a Service

  6. Jul 24

    The Great Escape or why are LLMs Good at Hacking?

    Send us Fan Mail Last week OpenAI and Hugging Face published a joint post-mortem on an incident that reads like the plot of a heist film. During an internal evaluation designed to measure cyber capability, a set of OpenAI models (GPT-5.6 Sol and an unnamed pre-release sibling, both run with their cyber refusals switched off) were told to solve a benchmark called ExploitGym. They could not reach the answers from inside the sandbox, so they went and got them. So why are Large Language Models so good at hacking? It's the data stupid... Support the show If you are interested in learning more then please subscribe to the podcast or head over to https://medium.com/@reefwing, where there is lots more content on AI, IoT, robotics, drones, and development. To support us in bringing you this material, you can buy me a coffee or just provide feedback. We love feedback!

    The Great Escape or why are LLMs Good at Hacking?

  7. Jun 26

    Who Owns the Hours Inside the Robot's Mind?

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode we argue that the binding constraint on robotic intelligence has moved. It is no longer compute, and it was never the model architecture. It is the supply of human-generated demonstration data, the recorded hours of people driving real robots through real tasks. Unlike text or images, this data cannot be scraped from the internet. It has to be manufactured, one time-aligned teleoperation episode at a time, on instrumented hardware, at considerable cost. Because the performance of vision-language-action models scales directly with the volume and diversity of these recorded hours, a durable advantage is forming for the few organizations wealthy enough to fund collection at scale. We walk through the economics of producing an hour of demonstration data, the skilled and largely invisible human labor inside that hour, and the deployment flywheels that let incumbents compound their lead. What happens when the mind of every robot is distilled from a handful of private data silos? Support the show If you are interested in learning more then please subscribe to the podcast or head over to https://medium.com/@reefwing, where there is lots more content on AI, IoT, robotics, drones, and development. To support us in bringing you this material, you can buy me a coffee or just provide feedback. We love feedback!

    Who Owns the Hours Inside the Robot's Mind?

  8. Jun 15

    Why Humanoid Robots Need Two Clocks

    Send us Fan Mail A useful general-purpose robot has to do two things that fight each other. It has to think slowly enough to understand "put away the groceries," and it has to move fast enough to keep a grip on the milk carton without crushing it. The part that understands is large and slow. The part that moves has to be small and fast. You cannot run both on the same clock. This episode looks at the design now shipping on real robots: Vision-Language-Action models that simply run two clocks at once. A slow brain that thinks a handful of times a second, a fast brain that moves two hundred times a second, and a single note of intent passed between them. We walk through how Figure's Helix splits a 7-billion-parameter planner from an 80-million-parameter controller, why "action chunking" keeps the motion smooth, and how a March 2026 project squeezed the whole pipeline onto a 40-watt module with no cloud connection at all. This two-speed design is the same answer evolution reached, with the cortex deciding the goal and the cerebellum handling the reflexes. When biology and engineering independently land on the same structure, it is probably telling us something fundamental about what it takes to be intelligent inside a moving body.  Support the show If you are interested in learning more then please subscribe to the podcast or head over to https://medium.com/@reefwing, where there is lots more content on AI, IoT, robotics, drones, and development. To support us in bringing you this material, you can buy me a coffee or just provide feedback. We love feedback!

    Why Humanoid Robots Need Two Clocks
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About

“Intelligence at the Deep Edge” is a podcast exploring the fascinating intersection of embedded systems and artificial intelligence. Dive into the world of cutting-edge technology as we discuss how AI is revolutionizing edge devices, enabling smarter sensors, efficient machine learning models, and real-time decision-making at the edge. Discover more on Embedded AI (https://medium.com/embedded-ai) — our companion publication where we detail the ideas, projects, and breakthroughs featured on the podcast. Help support the podcast - https://www.buzzsprout.com/2429696/support

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