An Irish technologist in Hangzhou, making sense of Chinese AI and robotics for the rest of the world, and the other way round.

Seven years passed between that first visit and the move. I came back to a different city: the labs behind DeepSeek, Qwen, Unitree and Deep Robotics are now all a short ride from my apartment. Most people follow Chinese technology from the other side of the world; I get to watch it up close, near enough to see what's really going on, foreign enough to be honest about it.

For most of those years I was doing something else entirely: a decade in London, architecting high-scale systems, leading the teams that built them, and staying close enough to the engineering to know when a plan wouldn't hold up in production. The work ran across manufacturing, retail, finance, hospitality and insurance. None of it was about AI, and all of it turned out to be useful preparation for it.

The work splits two ways. From the West: whether DeepSeek is safe to use, whether to build on Qwen, whether the humanoid demos match the factory floor. From China: a Western read on the wider market, where their tools fit beyond home, and what 'going global' actually asks of them.

Away from all that, I'm a photographer and a PADI Divemaster, which explains the galleries and the dive log scattered through this site. I spent a year in Barbados leading dives and strapping coral fragments to restoration frames. These days it's the part of my life with no screens in it, which is probably why it works.