About this site

Sentance Technology – Yes, the name is a pun. Or at least a near miss.

For most of my life, Sentance has just been my surname – mildly unusual, often misspelled (how I love spellcheck...) and occasionally mistaken for an affectation. But with the relatively recent rise of large language models, natural language processing and AI, it's taken on new resonance. I find myself living in a world where sentences serve a dual purpose: they're still how we express ourselves, but now they're also what machines study, imitate, and—to my continued amazement—generate with a fluency and apparent understanding that can be hard to distinguish from our own.

This blog is a space for me to think out loud about AI and its applications – especially in language, data, and the often awkward interface between humans and machines. I’ll share ideas, experiments, questions, and the occasional frustration. To be honest, I (mostly) find the maths in AI papers pretty hard going - typically when an author excuses a jump in explanation with the fatal phrase: "it can easily be shown that...". So one of my aims here is simple: if I can get my head around a concept well enough to explain it, there’s a good chance it might help others too. Think of it as a notebook written in plain English by someone who's still trying to debug his own training process, one painful parameter at a time.

So: welcome. If you’re curious about AI but allergic to hype, if you’re technical but still appreciate a bit of humour, or if you just want to see how far someone can stretch a surname into a theme — you’re in the right place. I’m figuring this out as I go: one idea, one experiment, one slightly baffling research paper at a time. If any of this resonates, feel free to get in touch or connect on LinkedIn.

Brian Sentance
April, 2025