Security is the most important frontier. @balderton, over half the investments I’ve led in the last year have been in cyber. And we should be doing even more. Great to see ARIA support researchers from day one.

People used to say knowledge is power - at the moment power is knowledge. My panel with @alexanderrinke on why your grid policy is your AI policy, and what we’re seeing on the ground @Balderton is now up on the HumanX site. Kind of them to put a massive ‘HUMAN’ sign behind me, just to reassure everyone.

Live in 5!

I went to an event with Michael Moritz and Alex Ferguson a few years ago in London - it was one of the most insightful discussions on character I’ve ever heard. Highly recommend this interview with him below, which captures a lot of it.

While there’s no requirement to do so we are trying to be as transparent as possible, so in response to ( another! ) FOI @UKSovereignAI added my conflicts of interest process to the site today along with others, for those interested. I hoped we’d put this all up earlier - but sadly I am not the webmaster or else there’d be a lot more gifs. As a small insight into how difficult it is to do things in Govt, there hasn’t been a SINGLE WEEK since our launch where team members haven’t had to spend hours responding to an FOI request, for things like ‘where are your investment companies based’ ( you can use Google! ) or ‘what copyright laws does a chip company breach’ ( as nonsensical as asking what fruit and veg laws a fighter jet breaches ). I understand that many FOI requests are now AI generated. But as the civil service isn’t allowed to use AI in the same way to respond to them, the abuse of this system is rife. There was a great piece in the Economist on this asymmetry choking parts of the state recently. It’s a significant cost of both our small team’s time and tax payers money. So I’m hoping that by releasing more publicly, even if delayed, it will reduce that burden on them. Thankfully, SovAI has a killer team who work around the clock anyway - more to come on how they’re working to strengthen the UK’s AI capabilities and economy next week.

We’re backing Exein again. As @giacuo says below, the most immediate risk from frontier AI models is cyber breaches. Exein is securing hardware from sophisticated devices to your fridge against these risks. Secure your chips!

Since its launch two weeks ago, over 700 British companies have applied to the @UKSovereignAI procurement scheme - a scheme we designed to remove as many of the blockers start-ups face when bidding on Government contracts as possible. To get a sense of the interest we have had, we hit the hard cap of 1000 attendees for the launch webinar - Brits want to build! Responses on eligibility will be sent out this week, and invites to bid on the challenges covering AI security, compute efficiency and better health services, will arrive soon too. Of course we are still a very small team at SovAI, and we only have 4 bids open ( but hope to have many more live by end of year! ), so naturally we will have to turn many applicants down. I know this will be disappointing, our decision making will not be perfect and it's a difficult process, thank you to everyone for bidding. And as a reminder, I personally do not see any applications and have no role in the decision process, that is led by our expert IC and mission champions, so while I appreciate the many reach-outs I really can do nothing to help specific companies. SovAI are working with other Departments to share what we've learned from this process to fix our procurement system, and will be launching more requests for cheaper, better and more innovative services for Government in the coming months.

It's good that MPs want to discuss long tail risks, and engage with what is certainly a technology that presents both a huge opportunity and challenge for Britain. But it is wholly irresponsible to say on the one hand 'we think this is really important' and on the other block the UK's ability to build AI capabilities here and support British AI companies. In the event that neither our allies nor foes listen to the proposed international agreement and that in fact a 'kill switch' is impossible, every single one of these MPs should be fighting to strengthen Britain's hand in this critical technology by supporting local datacenters, so we're not exporting our data abroad, reforming regulations so that AI models like cyber defenses can be trained here, so we're not entirely reliant on foreign technology and supporting British AI companies, so we see the economic benefits here too. We're doing our small bit at SovAI, but this should be a national level debate, and I hope this MP champions the UK scaling those ambitions just as passionately.

“This is my call to arms after 25 years: government, business, academia, and the public must treat national security not as the specialist concern of a handful of agencies, but as a shared national endeavour.”

This was great. Cheaper energy won’t solve all of the UK’s problems, but it will solve a lot of them! Worth reading Fuse’s open letter below, and the Vision for an AI-enabled energy system published this week, on how to make that happen.

‘Every time programmers get more leverage, doomers predict the end of software engineering. Compilers were supposed to shrink the profession. So was open source. So was the cloud. Instead, each leap made software cheaper to build, and demand for software, and engineers, exploded. It keeps happening because, as Milton Friedman observed, human wants and needs are infinite’