What if Britain’s central economic problem is that cost saving and not investment is at the heart of decision making? This is the question posed by Ed Conway in his @NewStatesman cover essay which I just caught up with. I cover the state and, broadly, I’d say this mentality is why we… - don’t yet have spades in the ground building new towns - why we haven’t built social housing and instead have a spiralling homelessness support and housing benefit bill - and why we’ve focussed on unemloyment support as opposed to employment schemes for young adults and now have a growing benefits bill. -allowed factories to close and jobs to disappear, leaving behind hollowed out and directionless communities Conway also links this problem to defence and compares our desire to always do things in the cheapest way possible with Germany and China, where there is laser focus on certain manufacturing industries and exports, for instance. newstatesman.com/politics/uk…

Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test. 48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video. It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).

UK prime minister Andy Burnham said Russia spends around £1.3bn per year manipulating information through bots, fake websites and falsified newspaper articles, including forged branding of British organisations such as the BBC lbc.co.uk/article/burnham-un…