Steve O’Brien · Founder, engineer & author
Building useful intelligence.
I build products, companies and technical systems at the edge of AI. Turning difficult ideas into things people can actually use.
Follow the work: new writing, progress on the book and what I’m building.
Or work with me ↓- Base
- Bristol, UK
- Experience
- 20+ years
- Building
- db3.ai · DOM Studio
01 · Search intelligence
GrowthScout ↗
02 · Interface systems
DOM Studio ↗
03 · Research & writing
Intelligence ↓
Selected systems
Ideas made operational.
Book in progress
Human, artificial and future intelligence.
An investigation into how minds work, how machines think, and what neuroscience may reveal about the future of intelligence.
01
Human
02
Artificial
03
Future
Ideas
Thinking in public.
Building a tiny language model from scratch
A hands-on, 19-part exploration of the Transformer—from tokenisation and attention through training, ablation, and generation.
02Defining intelligence
Why intelligence remains difficult to define—and why the definition matters as we build increasingly capable machines.
03Should you build an LLM from scratch?
Why most teams should start with hosted models, owned evaluation data, and open-weight experiments before training from scratch.
Work with me
Find your way in.
Pick the one that matches what you need.
For your business
Build your software
Replace expensive SaaS tools with software built around what makes your business different. Your own software, AI integrations and data. You save money, or you don’t pay.
See how it works
For companies
Have AI built for you
db3 Labs builds working AI systems inside your business. We agree the outcomes up front and you pay for each one when it is delivered.
db3 Labs
For teams
Learn to do it yourselves
One AI process implemented for you, one with you, and the skills to scale AI work independently with your team. Includes courses and the Skool community.
The course
For developers
Build on db3.ai
An open-source TypeScript framework that brings models, authentication, queues, storage and AI into one runtime.
db3.ai Framework
Founder · Engineer · Author
Steve O’Brien
Founder experience. Engineer’s instinct.
I’ve spent more than two decades building software and companies, from first prototype to scaled operation. Today I work on practical AI products, developer systems, and the deeper question of what intelligence actually is.
Based in Bristol, I stay close to the architecture, product and code—especially when the problem is still ambiguous.
Follow along
Learn what I learn, as I learn it.
New writing on AI and intelligence, progress on the book, and what I’m building with db3.ai.