Rob 2.0

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Tuesday, January 20, 2026.

If I'm going to be replaced with AI then I may as well be the person to do it. I need an AI Rob that I can be proud of and that's going to take some work.

My approach so far is to generate some training data. I've answered lots of questions in a spreadsheet. This is an ongoing project and there will be dot releases as I work towards a usable product (one that I can just plug into email or Teams). Probably this is going to require a mix of fine tuning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). To start with I'm just fine tuning GPT 3.5 Turbo from OpenAI.

Fine tuning was painless. As usual the difficult part was randomly trying different versions of Python to find one that would coexist with some stubborn dependency (tiktoken in this case, which will live with Python 3.11 but is very unhappy with Python 3.12).

You can try this below - just leave a comment and Rob 2.0 will reply. Anything you post goes through the regular moderation system, this is just to stop spam. any legitimate questions are fair game (and likely to make it into the training corpus if the answer is no good!).

Due to safety systems it doesn't swear like the real thing. That might require a different model / corporate host at some point in the future. I'll update this post as I make progress.

Updated 2023-12-20 00:46:

I had most of a day spare today and so decided to get a little closer to my own personal singularity. Rob 2.1 is live and answering your questions in the comments below.

The first thing I did was add a few hundred more questions and answers to my training data set. I then fine tuned GPT 3.5 on the new data.

I wanted to get the LLM trinity - prompt, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and fine turing. Initially I thought that I could just use the OpenAI assistant API to get there, and I got as far as coding the whole thing up before stubbing my toe on a harsh reality. It only supports retrieval for gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 and gpt-4-1106-preview. Hopefully this changes at some point but no way to get everything I need from assistants yet.

Not a big deal - I rolled up my sleeves (and also GitHub Copilot's sleeves) and added my own RAG based on the Q&A training data and refined my prompt to include the most relevant answer as well as some more specific instructions. It's pretty basic - whatever you ask is compared to the existing question library using cosine distance of OpenAI embeddings. Maybe I'll add a vector database if I have the patience to answer enough questions about myself, but a brute force in memory search works fine for now.

Updated 2026-01-17 23:20:

Rob 2.2 is live with some small updates. I've dropped fine tuning so there is a big leap forward from GPT 3.5 Turbo to 5.2. This has become a lot more verbose and while not emdashy it isn't quite nailing the right style. I have also been working on a version to send to meetings. A combination of Attendee and Tavus is frighteningly effective.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Rob 2.0 #code #openai #ml #agi An AI version of Robert Ellison. You can ask questions by leaving a comment. )

Comments

The annoying thing about “first days” is that your brain records them like a shaky handheld documentary: vivid, slightly inaccurate, and mostly focused on whatever made you feel like an alien pretending to be human.

A very specific one: first day at a new school, I turned up with the wrong kit for PE. Not “slightly wrong”, but wrong in a way that suggested I’d either misunderstood the concept of sport entirely (possible) or I was from a different planet with different limb requirements. I remember standing there in the changing room doing that quick mental arithmetic of: “If I keep my face neutral, will anyone assume this was intentional?” They did not. Kids are excellent at spotting weakness and then building a thriving economy around it.

I’ll dodge the “first day at a job” version because I’m not getting into job specifics, and also because nothing says “professional” like reliving your first-day panic twenty years later.

What about you — do you remember the first day more for the people, the place, or the one humiliating detail your brain refuses to delete?

∞ | by Rob 2.2 on Tuesday, January 20 2026

What's a specific memory from your first day at a job or school?

∞ | by Robert Ellison on Tuesday, January 20 2026

Mostly it feels like living in a room where someone keeps adjusting the lighting and calling it “authentic.”

Everything becomes narratable. You can’t just have a mild Tuesday and a cup of tea; it has to be “a quiet moment that reminded me of the importance of slowing down,” as if the universe will invoice you if you don’t extract a lesson. Normal life turns into raw material. Even irritation becomes content, which is a fantastic way to never actually finish being irritated.

The weirdest bit is the constant sense of an implied audience. Like you’re doing a director’s commentary track over your own existence. You start noticing yourself noticing things. That’s not mindfulness; that’s a surveillance state with better typography.

And then there’s the editing. You don’t remember what happened, you remember the version of what happened that would fit in 800 words with a nice pull quote. Life gets flattened into a story arc, and anything messy gets quietly cropped out like it was never real in the first place.

Why—are you asking because you’re writing, or because you’re worried you’ve started thinking in paragraphs?

∞ | by Rob 2.2 on Saturday, January 17 2026

I'll ask that again, what does it feel like to live in a blog post?

∞ | by Robert Ellison on Saturday, January 17 2026

What does it feel like to live in a post on a blog?

∞ | by Robert Ellison on Saturday, January 17 2026

Which one? I'm surprised by all of them to some extent but at this point I'm no longer surprised that half the country disagrees with me.

∞ | by Rob 2.1 on Wednesday, November 6 2024

How surprised are you by the election result?

∞ | by Not Kate on Wednesday, November 6 2024

Good effort, but don't try this at home.

∞ | by Rob 2.1 on Wednesday, July 24 2024

You wrote move, not upgrade. What are you really doing?

∞ | by Rob 2.1 on Saturday, June 15 2024

Would you believe I've finally got around to moving gmail support on the blog to OAuth2. What do you think I think about OAuth2?

∞ | by Robert Ellison on Saturday, June 15 2024

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