Meet Digital Actors, Iconic's latest technology. No dialogue trees. No menus. Just you, your voice, and an officer on a failing submarine. AI role-playing characters that you can actually talk to. Play our first showcase, Pressure Point: iconicgames.io/blog/pressure…

We @bold_lab_ai are hiring a large cohort of home and overseas students for Fall 2027 entry. If you’re excited about discovering the next paradigm of open-source AI and want to work on ambitious, exploratory, but scalable ML, please apply. More application details and exact timeline coming soon, in the meantime please register your interest here bold-lab.ai/opportunities/ 🦋🦋🦋

NON COMPETES BANNED Today, the PM has announced that his Government will legislate to functionally ban non-compete agreements for startups and scaleups in the UK or as he called it - the Bosman ruling for ruling for the innovation sector' 😂 At the @StartupCltn been working on this for months and we think it’s a huge potential unlock for our tech ecosystem. Here’s what you need to know… - Measures to functionally ban non-competes for startups and scaleups in the UK are going to be set out. - There will also be consultation on a wider set of restrictive practices including gardening leave. - More detail on these plans at the budget in a few weeks (Wednesday 28th October) including a timetable for consultation with a view to legislation in the coming months. We think this is a huge move and so do lots of friends including so many of the great founders that signed the letter with Inherent just the other week. Why? Because talent matters and mobile talent means startups can build. The Valley was built on free-flowing talent. In the UK, we’re now seeing our own versions of this story with companies being built from alumni of both homegrown firms like Revolut and beyond. But we need that to move faster. Hiring and building faster means British startups and scaleups can grow faster. Barriers to that slow our ecosystem down. We won’t pretend it will be perfect, and people (including some of our friends but also lots of fairly vested interests too) will have a right to disagree. But we think that startups will thrive and win in a faster paced Britain. So we are delighted with the progress today - as part of a strong speech by the PM outlining his ambition for building the world’s leading innovation nation including more on tax, growing companies outside London and more. But this is the start, not the end of the process. The announcement launches a consultation. It doesn't mean the issue is settled. How far reform goes, and what it looks like on the ground, is still to be decided. The Prime Minister today has done something that can materially impact the trajectory of the UK tech ecosystem and with it our economy - but only if we make sure it’s delivered. So, the real work starts now.

Upcoming ICARL seminar! Can RL algorithms be automatically discovered? Junhyuk Oh @junh_oh (@IneffableLabs) will present a line of work on meta-learning RL 🤖 update rules from data. 🗓️7th October at 5 pm 📍Huxley Building, Imperial College London, room 311 @ICComputing Register here: eventbrite.com/e/imperial-co… Hybrid seminar, with a caloric-rewarded in-person networking session with the speaker and organisers after the talk. Open also to non-Imperial attendees. Co-hosted with @ICDoCSoc Sponsored by @iconicgamesio

Upcoming ICARL seminar next Thursday! 🥳 We are excited to continue our series with Vibhavari Dasagi @VDasagi (@GoogleDeepMind), who will be giving a local learning perspective on transformers 🤖. What is each part of a transformer actually doing? Drawing on lessons from AdA and Genie, Vibhavari will dissect the roles of initialisation, the optimiser, attention and the MLP, and what this means for future architecture design. 🗓️Thursday 24/09 at 5 pm 📍Huxley Building, Imperial College London, room 340 @ICComputing Register here: eventbrite.com/e/imperial-co… Hybrid seminar, with a caloric-rewarded in-person networking session with the speaker and organisers after the talk. As usual, also open to non-Imperial attendees. Co-hosted with @ICDoCSoc Sponsored by @iconicgamesio

Upcoming ICARL seminar next Thursday! 🥳 We are excited to continue our series with Vibhavari Dasagi @VDasagi (@GoogleDeepMind), who will be giving a local learning perspective on transformers 🤖. What is each part of a transformer actually doing? Drawing on lessons from AdA and Genie, Vibhavari will dissect the roles of initialisation, the optimiser, attention and the MLP, and what this means for future architecture design. 🗓️Thursday 24/09 at 5 pm 📍Huxley Building, Imperial College London, room 340 @ICComputing Register here: eventbrite.com/e/imperial-co… Hybrid seminar, with a caloric-rewarded in-person networking session with the speaker and organisers after the talk. As usual, also open to non-Imperial attendees. Co-hosted with @ICDoCSoc Sponsored by @iconicgamesio

Naturalness tells you if a voice sounds human. It says nothing about whether the delivery fit the scene. We build TTS voices for interactive characters, and what actually matters is appropriateness. Benchmarks don't measure it. New blog post on that! iconicgames.io/blog/illusion…

We find that 1) Opus 5 & Fable marked a real increase in ability on these games, but they still struggle with the hardest tiers of games (Tiers 6 and 7) 2) Agentic harnesses like Prime don’t offer any benefit over a basic (non coding!) harness 3) There’s a large gap between closed-source (Opus 5) and open-source models (Kimi K3) and another big gap to smaller open-source models (Qwen 3.6 27B) Finally, rule discovery really is the bottleneck in these games: when we give the ground-truth rules in plain language, even the previously weakest models score near perfect. (4/5)

We're pleased to announce funding of two PhD students as part of the UK Government-backed investment in new AI research labs led by @UniofOxford, @imperialcollege & @ucl. We’re proud to support the next generation of AI researchers shaping the future of interactive entertainment

The Prime Minister, @andyburnham, today asked me to attend Cabinet as Minister for AI, a sign of his deep commitment to AI's importance. AI is likely the most significant technology in human history. Its impact will dwarf other things. The best case for it is compelling beyond our dreams: a reindustrialised Britain, stronger national security, public services transformed for the better. The risks, too, are real: it is right that the British public shares those worries, for jobs, for the pace of change. The central fact is that it is happening. Nations have a narrow window to decide whether they shape AI or get shaped by it. Britain is in that window right now. While that window is still open, I will act with pace, I will act with ambition, and I will focus relentlessly on securing British influence in shaping AI. I will also bring to this job the place I represent - a constituency in Wales, a nation with industry and ambition at its heart, a proud history of punching above its weight on the global stage. A nation which welcomed a 12-year old and his family, gave us the best chance at opportunity, put me in Parliament as Wales' first ethnic minority MP, and now affords me the chance to make a mark in Cabinet. Diolch o galon to everyone in the Vale of Glamorgan. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

📣 Today with @Founders_Forum we've published an open letter to Andy Burnham: Rebuild Britain. It's signed by 100+ founders & investors who are clear that the next few years will make or break Britain as a tech power. We must: Back founders on tax, investment and more Unlock scaleup capital Bulldoze "computer says no" regulation Deliver procurement £ for British tech Ensure tech talent in Government We're ready to rebuild Britain. And want to work with anyone who wants to do it with us. 🇬🇧 Agree? Sign here 👇 rebuild-britain.com/