Melbourne, AU
Solution Engineering · Building · Writing
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11
Articles published
4
Topics covered
2
Live tools
2
Projects in progress
Sam Bessey: I make modern AI legible for practitioners and the curious. RAG, MCP, fine tuning, quantization in plain English, with working code and real diagrams.
Writing & Work
sambessey.com / articlesAI for the Curious — Series
A field guide to modern AI. Working diagrams and real code over buzzwords. My notes on how I explain these concepts to practitioners and the curious.
Perspectives
Top Trumps: LLM Edition
Local models are printing impressive benchmark scores against models ten times their size. Let's read the card and see what happens when you actually play it.
Build vs Buy: The House of Mirrors
Capable open-source AI models have reignited the build vs buy debate. The economics are less obvious than they appear.
Labs
Field report
Fine-Tuning: Training The Actor
Fine-tuning explained with a fun, interactive demo of changing a small model's behaviour to write like an unbearable person on LinkedIn.
Field report
Fine-Tuning in Practice: Building the Fine-Tune
A practical walkthrough of the Python, hardware and decisions behind fine-tuning a small Gemma model to write unbearable LinkedIn posts.
Setup guide
pgvector Setup for RAG
A practical guide to setting up pgvector on Neon and running your first similarity query
Field report
KV Quantisation: Measuring Coastlines
I ran 170 tests to try and break TurboQuant KV compression. Here's what actually failed, what didn't, and why the answer to both questions matters more than the score.