From curiosity to capability: Why thought leaders must ground ideas in real experience

I see so many thought leadership posts, many fascinating but also unfortunately, many clearly not being grounded in hard won personal experiences. These experiences can be as significant as running multi million pound programs of work, but equally, can be about the learning journey folk take themselves on and the small successes they find along that journey. I'm super fortunate to be in a position where #IBM enables us to do both, be it driving large bids, leading and delivering complex engagements, coupled with our 'Think 40' which sets the minimum expected bar of learning - with many folk looking to achieve far more than this, indeed last year I completed 232 hours of learning! I may be an anomaly as I have an innate curiosity about things and once my attention has been captured I wind up in all sorts of interesting places!!

One such example was just this morning - For Christmas this year I managed to source myself a Surface Pro 11 Snapdragon Elite device, despite my worries on the fact it was an eBay purchase, it's all worked out and I've been using the device as my primary travel device, as the battery far outlasts my very powerful, heavy Lenovo T15! One of the drivers for acquiring the Surface was to enrol in the preview program, such that I can experience Windows Recall. I have to say, despite all the discussion this feature has created - for me it's a super, super useful thing to have to hand. Being able to do this in a safe manner outside of my primary work device enables me to tolerate the, sometimes, well erm, quirky updates that happen in the insider program!

Anyways, back to the point - today I spotted the following updates (Image taken from the Windows Recall experience)

Here I see the third update - Phi Silica! Now I was aware of the Phi models, and I was aware that the NPU on the device obviously ran a SLM, but I had completely missed that there was a sister-series of the Phi Models that ran on-device. A bit more digging unearths a recent article in early February which talks about how to use Phi Silica in your own apps using the Windows App SDK - note this is only in the experimental channel release of the Windows App SDK & as a result, you can't publish any of these apps to the Microsoft Store.

So why does this matter? Well for Copilot+ PC's it means the model is already there and available for use. So I think to myself, I can create a windows app and there is a SLM ready and waiting for me to do things with, I don't have to worry about calling out to the cloud or bringing another model (of course I can still chose to do this) onto the device - and yes, this is a great example of where my curiosity thrives, so off I go to experiment with this!

First, I need the Windows App SDK Experimental Channel so that I can get access to the Phi Model on my device, I then use the community version of Visual Studio to create a simple app, this begins it's life as a single page with a button on:

So after some fiddling to get my dependencies sorted, the next step was to make the page take input and have the button do something more useful!

With that working, the final step was then to use the exemplar code provided in the previously mentioned Microsoft Learn article and here I used Github Copilot to help me merge it into the code plus to do a bit of formatting & renaming of the button etc. ultimately resulting in......

Hazar!! It works! My curiousity has taken me on a journey that I hadn't expected today, and I'm pumped that I got my (very!) simple application working and communicating with the Phi Silica LLM in the space of a hour - awesome awesome stuff!🎉 and to help others, I've shared this very simple application in my Github here: Github Repo for LocalPhiSilica App.

So, stay curious and always keep learning, as you never know where these journeys will take you!