Ashley Hirst writes on community — Jewish and British — artificial intelligence, and insurance & risk.https://ashleyhirst.com/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-09-01-apple-didnt-lose-the-ai-race-it-declined-to-enter-it/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-09-01-apple-didnt-lose-the-ai-race-it-declined-to-enter-it/By treating frontier models as components to buy, benchmark and replace, Apple is betting its AI advantage will come from silicon, privacy and the integration layer.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-31-anthropics-max-plan-has-a-trust-problem/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-31-anthropics-max-plan-has-a-trust-problem/Promise 4x, charge 2x, get ~1.5x — not a great way to get trust.Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-30-what-i-would-focus-on-in-the-src-division/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-30-what-i-would-focus-on-in-the-src-division/I would focus on the places where British Jews need practical change: workplaces, public institutions and universities.Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-30-why-i-came-back-to-swiss-re/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-30-why-i-came-back-to-swiss-re/Three months after rejoining Swiss Re, some reflections on four years in a small company, what they taught me, and why an institution I already trusted was the right place to use it.Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-28-why-i-am-standing-for-the-src-division/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-28-why-i-am-standing-for-the-src-division/I want British Jews to do more than feel secure enough to endure. I want us to live openly, confidently and joyfully, as the whole Jewish tribe.Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-24-learning-by-experience-in-a-world-of-ai/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-24-learning-by-experience-in-a-world-of-ai/If AI takes over routine underwriting, the answer is not to preserve a hand-underwriting quota: it is to route exceptions to humans and make replay the training ground.Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-21-the-trouble-with-training-talent/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-08-21-the-trouble-with-training-talent/Firms never paid for junior training: it was a free byproduct of low-value work that AI has now taken, and no individual firm has an incentive to restart funding the talent pipeline.Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-07-16-an-open-letter-to-the-archbishop-of-canterbury-do-not-sort-u/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-07-16-an-open-letter-to-the-archbishop-of-canterbury-do-not-sort-u/I am not asking you to defend the Jews. I am asking you to defend the establishment, and the un-radical proposition that the church of the whole nation cannot pick which of the nation's minorities it will hearThu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-07-13-we-waited-for-shabbat-to-end-then-roared-for-englands-victor/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-07-13-we-waited-for-shabbat-to-end-then-roared-for-englands-victor/As an Orthodox Jew I had to wait 18 minutes into the match before turning on the TV – but after that I was cheering just as loud as any other fanMon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-06-12-iteration-eats-planning-for-lunch/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-06-12-iteration-eats-planning-for-lunch/Anyone trying to get something done inside a company faces an implicit choice: how much to settle before they start.Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-05-28-mr-osborne-let-us-find-our-nerve-again/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-05-28-mr-osborne-let-us-find-our-nerve-again/Dear George Osborne ,Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-05-11-why-the-standard-life-model-could-go-european/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-05-11-why-the-standard-life-model-could-go-european/Anyone watching the UK bulk annuity market has been turning over the Standard Life carve-out for the past few weeks (I know, this is a mass appeal article).Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-05-07-five-thoughts-on-life-insurance-liabilities-being-taken-priv/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-05-07-five-thoughts-on-life-insurance-liabilities-being-taken-priv/The migration of long-duration life insurance liabilities from listed insurers into private capital structures is one of the largest reallocations of financial capital underway in the developed world.Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-05-05-actually-getting-value-out-of-ai/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-05-05-actually-getting-value-out-of-ai/Anyone using AI – specifically, LLMs – eventually has to deal with the same question.Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-04-28-a-timeline-the-sja-gails-and-institutional-failure/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-04-28-a-timeline-the-sja-gails-and-institutional-failure/Here's a timeline for you — from a Guardian column minimising hate crimes against a Jewish-linked bakery to 'Columnist of the Year' six weeks later.Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-04-13-start-worrying-about-your-dependency-on-specific-ai-companie/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-04-13-start-worrying-about-your-dependency-on-specific-ai-companie/Cursor's maker Anysphere announced a $2.3b Series D in November 2025 - $29.3b post-money valuation, past a billion in annualised revenue and accelerating. Bloomberg reported it topped $2b by February 2026.Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-04-01-jews-and-israel-a-tribal-connection/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-04-01-jews-and-israel-a-tribal-connection/Tonight we sit down to the Seder. We'll eat the matzah, dip the herbs, sing the songs.Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-03-26-what-8x-cheaper-inference-actually-means-for-your-business/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-03-26-what-8x-cheaper-inference-actually-means-for-your-business/Yesterday I posted about TurboQuant, a Google Research paper that compresses the main memory bottleneck in large language models by over 6x.Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-03-23-a-letter-to-my-british-and-jewish-children/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2026-03-23-a-letter-to-my-british-and-jewish-children/Every Sunday evening, between the ages of about eight and fifteen, I went to a Jewish youth group in west London.Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2020-11-12-on-rabbi-sacks-and-the-jewish-library/https://ashleyhirst.com/writing/2020-11-12-on-rabbi-sacks-and-the-jewish-library/A mental image of the Jewish intellectual space — and what it meant to lose the person who stood by the open French window between Jewish and non-Jewish thought.Thu, 12 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT