From the Beginning to Smartboxx AI

The quest for artificial intelligence is almost as old as computers themselves. From the basic mechanical calculator to the addition of the transistor to perform computation using electronics, both computer scientists and science fiction writers have imagined a world filled with assistants that can do the harder work of being human—performing routine tasks autonomously and accurately, and, in the case of robots, vacuuming and doing the dishes.

Over the last 50 years, we’ve been able to train computers using sophisticated mathematical models to mimic the way humans think and understand language. Much like you learn what an object is by labelling and repetition—i.e., someone tells you it's a dog, then you develop the ability to identify many different kinds of dogs over time, given more data—so did artificial neural networks learn how to categorise and then infer, moving from first identification to prediction. Language models use these mathematical tools to construct statistically “really good guesses” about what word comes next in a sentence based on the context and the model’s pre-training.

Why now? These models have existed for some time, but without enough pictures of dogs, a Chihuahua may look like a cat if you're not careful. Enter the biggest dataset humans have ever created—the internet. Giving a computer the ability to create mathematical models of language based on a truly massive amount of data means it can get very good at inferring what you are saying and how to respond in a way that makes you happy.

The thing about this new paradigm of computing, though, is that it can be unexpected. It’s for this reason that these technologies are still in the “find out” phase of development. Foundational or SOTA (state-of-the-art) models, like the ones developed and deployed by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Meta, and Grok, are general-purpose models. This means they can take a variety of inputs and, based on some system rules (don’t swear, use bullet points for lists, etc.) and some agents (e.g., when the user asks for a PDF, use a software library to generate it or ‘go find this answer on the internet’), produce something that feels pretty coherent.

In the world of business, though, our objectives aren’t creating images of superheroes or designing an itinerary for a beachside holiday, but rather real-world, transactional tasks that need to be predictable—if not spot on—i.e., not the natural place for a large language model... unless.

By using strong, data-driven context constraints, we can start to deploy these tools as some of the most powerful technologies ever seen in business. Why? We are able to use AI-driven tools faster and more reliably than we can rely on human intelligence, which still has the limitations of biology to contend with. AI models our behaviour and does it faster, more consistently, more accurately—and without sleep.

This should not be seen as a doomsday scenario, though. We are still at the stage of automation and augmentation, rather than replacement. Where we could be replaced is in certain kinds of work that are better performed via automation—but certainly not entirely. We remain the decision-makers and leaders of our AI tools, just as we are the decision-makers and leaders in the businesses we run and the work we do.

At Retro Rabbit/Smartek21, we have enabled smart business leaders and teams to access greater efficiencies and certainty in routine tasks, freeing up humans to do the more complex work we actually excel at. With our turn-key AI toolbox—with security and compliance baked in—we’ve deployed important use cases across large organisations that deliver the same business outcomes you’ve always needed, but at 20 times lower cost and with a 200 times return on investment, and very quickly.

From all my years of business and technology experience, this is pretty impressive. With this toolbox, we are enabling businesses to stay ahead of the fast-moving curve while wowing their teams and customers.

Talk to us about our ready-to-go AI use cases for your business—and we’ll help keep you ahead of that fast-moving curve.