The reports of open-weight’s death have been greatly exaggerated again, it seems. An astonishing first model release, open-weight and from an 🇺🇸 & 🇬🇧 based team. Congrats @real_ioannis, @sahnihim and all @reflection_ai.

A lot in here I agree with: - The public discussion seems to be mostly on AI hypotheticals. But there are serious and present opportunities and challenges facing the UK today. - AI capabilities are hard power in the same way our military, energy and infrastructure are, and should be treated as such. - While Brits should have access to the best services in the world wherever they’re built, we must have more of these capabilities here at home as well to ensure resilience and leverage. The @UKSovereignAI Unit was set-up with much of this in mind - kind of David to give us a mention, but we’re only a small part of the solution.

Some quick ( and free! ) wins here for the Government to look at to support British researchers and engineers.

One of the most difficult parts of our job @balderton is trying to forecast the future, and understand how complex events, risks and opportunities are related. I'm delighted to be backing Ben, Toby and the @_Mantic_AI team to make doing that easier for everyone. Using Mantic to understand how different events, from interest rate rises to congressional race outcomes are related, feels like having a crystal ball. Learn more about what they're building, and open roles here in the UK & beyond at mantic.com .

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.

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.