The book — "The Model Is Part of the Programme: Operational Discipline in the Language-Model Era" — published today. Hardcover and ebook through the same UK technical-publishing house I have worked with on the 2019, 2021, and 2022 books. The launch event tonight is at a small venue in Bristol with a few-dozen invited customer-and-partner attendees; the broader publicity programme through Q1 will include podcast appearances, the few security-community trade-press interviews that produce useful audience for technical-publishing work, and the standard book-launch signings at Infosec Europe in June and at Black Hat USA in August.
The book's substantive content is the language-model-environment material that I have been writing through 2023 — the security-relevant implications of the post-ChatGPT capability inflection, the offensive-and-defensive use-case landscape, the regulatory-environment progression, the engineering-discipline implications for SOC-and-detection-engineering work that integrate language-model capability. The case studies are anonymised across the customer portfolio; the EmilyAI-product-development arc is in the personal-history register rather than as the principal narrative; the operational-recommendations are the substantive output for customer-organisation strategic planning.
The arc to today. Five years from the original USENIX Security 2019 paper that the lead engineer presented in Santa Clara. Six years from the EmilyAI commercial v1 customer-pilot deployment in April 2018. Fifteen years from founding Hedgehog in April 2009. The team's transformation from a one-person consultancy through to a thirty-nine-person hybrid services-and-product business with substantive academic-and-conference contribution and now four published books in security-operational-discipline is the kind of long-arc work that is, on the personal-reflection measure, satisfying.
The launch event tonight is also the closest the company has come to a substantive ten-year-anniversary marker since the deferred April 2020 event. The customer-and-partner invitee list overlaps substantially with the 2020 deferred event's planned guest list. The Bristol venue is, on the practical-logistics measure, a substitute for the Bath venue that was originally planned. The wife and the children are coming up for the event. The team has organised an after-event small dinner.
I will return to writing about the book's reception as the Q1 launch programme progresses. Tonight is for the event, the team, and the customers who have been part of the work.