Martin Kleppmann

imported into the EU.

the importer needs to prove exactly which plot of land it actually came from and then check against satellite imagery that that was not recently deforested.

And so I've been looking into using cryptography as a tool of proving things about the supply chains of these physical products, but without revealing commercially sensitive information.

For example, a company will not want to reveal who its suppliers were and which ingredient to its process it purchased from which supplier, for example, because that

might reveal something about its secret recipe that it uses and so the hope here is that cryptography can allow us to prove that for example the the accounting has been done correctly across supply chains but without having to reveal publicly any of this sensitive data about suppliers or other customers

Yeah, I mean, I'm not that deeply into the AI things, really.

I'm seeing it more through my collaborators who are making very good use of AI tools for software development, especially.

I personally write very little code these days, and so I haven't had that much need or occasion to actually use AI agents myself personally.

When writing prose, like working on the book, for example, I prefer to still do that the old fashioned way of just write every word by hand.

So I haven't let AI anywhere near the text of the book, for example.

And I don't know if that's the right decision.

It's not really a principle thing that I think it would be wrong to do so.

It's more that for myself, the process of writing is the way how I figure things out.

And

figuring things out is really my goal here so i'm i'm trying to figure it out in my own head and for that i just have to write it myself there's this doesn't seem to be any way around it but using ai as a way of like getting feedback on ideas or exploring like whether an idea really holds up to scrutiny or things like that that seems like a very productive use of the technology and that applies for for both industry and academia i would say

Yeah, my feeling is they're not really that mutually exclusive or rather some of the best PhD students I've worked with, for example, actually have a few years of industry experience.

So they might have done an undergraduate, maybe done a master's, then spent a few years in industry developing like actual doing real software engineering, learning about the real world.

And then maybe at some point got bored and thought, oh, actually, you know, I want to

work on maybe more idealistic things or have more freedom to choose their own research topics and then start getting interested in doing a PhD.

And that I find is quite a healthy route.