I'm in the @financialtimes.com, discussing what it might take for the new DSIT Machinery of Government changes to work. Lots of very thoughtful commentary in the piece from folks that understand what it takes to drive change in government. Some further thoughts from me below 🧵

Kanishka Narayan's appointment is a really positive development - he is fantastically capable and credible on AI. Key questions: what levers he will have in his new role, as well as whether HMG keep excellent teams in AISI, No 10 etc, well-empowered in the new structure

MoG change now would be a disaster. Some takes as someone who has recently worked on AI in govt 🧵

Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 3w ago

Feels like the answer to improving DSIT is some decent policymaking, rather than retiring it (wch would be a huge drag - shuffling departments takes up a lot of time and energy). The problem ofc is that Labour doesn't have a v strong SciTech talent pool to draw on giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

On procurement nod in Burnham speech: 1.) 10% of tender weighting for central govt is already committed to social value 2.) Contractors have mixed views to say the least... worth reading @re-state.bsky.social's public sector survey of where it does and doesn't succeed re-state.co.uk/publications...

This is a notable break from orthodoxy that guides thinking within the British state. But it is necessary in order for the UK to compete globally and restore sovereignty There are a few challenges that this poses. What are they, and how can govt respond? www.theguardian.com/business/202...

‘I’m picking winners’: UK business secretary takes activist approach to economic growth

AI evangelist Peter Kyle wants to scale up businesses, attract overseas investors and look out for UK’s poorer regions

theguardian.com

50 papers published at Neurips 2025 (one of the three major global ML conferences) have AI hallucinations. Another example of how institutions need to evolve the tooling they have to spot pollution of the knowledge commons

Had fun pouring through some of the great data from @epochai.bsky.social's new AI Chip Sales Tracker It illustrates a bifurcating global supply chain and new cost leaders emerging 🧵 epoch.ai/data/ai-chip...

Politicians: don't use AI to make your maps.

Extremely exciting day for open science. Another reason to be bullish on UK AI. Boltz, a startup that emerged out of MIT to be at the frontier of small molecule and protein design, has moved to London. I hear cases like this from a few founders, often a mix of fundamentals (talent)+personal.

Gabriele Corso@gcorso.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Big news from Boltz today: we’re launching Boltz Lab, a new platform with new small-molecule + protein design agents, announcing Boltz PBC and a $28M seed round, and sharing a multi-year partnership with Pfizer. More below!

A heck of a chart: in every single one of the 10 major US cities that built the most housing between 2017 and 2023, rents for older, existing units fell—often by quite a bit.

Decentralised training of AI, where thousands of small datacenters, or individual consumers, pool their spare compute over the internet, is 20xing in scale a year. But this is nowhere near the scale of leading AI infra projects or non-AI decentralised projects. Great piece by @epochai.bsky.social

V good thread. IMV what’s double damning about the Ovenden piece is that you could write a thousand pieces about how Whitehall could run better, but absolutely none of them would run through “why should the diplomatic service care about a British citizen in an authoritarian jail?”

Tom Westgarth@tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 7mo ago

I have a few thoughts on the Stakeholder State and the piece by Paul Ovenden. I disagree with the extent of emphasis on stakeholders, but the more dismissive engagement on this app misses that a Strong Stakeholderism does exist, and has placed particular constraints on a govt that lacks direction 🧵

I have a few thoughts on the Stakeholder State and the piece by Paul Ovenden. I disagree with the extent of emphasis on stakeholders, but the more dismissive engagement on this app misses that a Strong Stakeholderism does exist, and has placed particular constraints on a govt that lacks direction 🧵

Duncan Robinson@duncanrobinson.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The Blob, the Groups and now The Stakeholder state Alaa Abd el-Fattah has shown supremacy of the Stakeholder State www.thetimes.com/article/3720...

Brilliant appointment. Jade has done exceptional work in government through AISI, and with her background in VC and frontier AI from the very beginning, she’s exactly the sort of person you want helping the UK prepare for the AI era

Are you a UK AI academic that wants to be GPU rich this summer? The Sovereign AI Unit has a call out for high ambition proposals in our core priority areas. Apply by July 7th! www.gov.uk/government/p...

Sovereign AI AIRR launch opportunity: call for researchers

gov.uk

This from @tomwestgarth.bsky.social on the emerging "progress" scene makes for interesting reading – and includes a mention of our podcast! tomwestgarth.substack.com/p/join-the-u...

Join the UK Progress Idea Machine

Momentum is building around a new movement trying to revive the UK. We describe who they are, what is missing, and how you can help.

tomwestgarth.substack.com

There is a growing community dedicated to unlocking U.K. progress and abundance. Come to the next TxP to hear from organisations such as ARIA, Centre for British Progress, Nucleate, Inference Magazine, Digital Frontier, and Project Europe! lu.ma/fuf590zb?loc...

TxP: The UK Progress Idea Machine · Luma

Join us at Wayve for a showcase of organisations working to unlock UK progress! Momentum is growing amongst a community of ambitious young folks in the UK.…

lu.ma

Super appointment. It’s great to see so many people from the startup world going into public service! www.gov.uk/government/n...

New executive chair selected to boost innovation and growth across the UK

Tom Adeyoola selected as preferred candidate to head up Innovate UK.

gov.uk

This prompts an interesting discussion about how these tools may soon be cultural artifacts. Things like BBC historical video archives aren’t just great for understanding evolving values, but changing production techniques etc. Will compute costs eat these cultural phenomena?

The next TxP will explode art as a space for AI R&D. Panellists include Mat Dryhurst, Flora Weil, and Will Fraudenheim! lu.ma/ff7rj1z5?loc...

TxP & Restless Egg | Art Made AI: Demos, Discussion, DJs · Luma

On Fri 31st Jan, TxP x Restless Egg present Art Made AI: Going beyond the zero-sum lens of copyright/IP debates, Art Made AI will unpack how art is a space for…

lu.ma

Wondering if there are any DJs (especially female/non-binary DJs) in my tech policy network that would be interested in spinning some plates at the next TxP event. 🎧 🎶 Dm me if interested!

bernie sanders is wearing a jacket and glasses and says `` i am once again asking ''

ALT: bernie sanders is wearing a jacket and glasses and says `` i am once again asking ''

media.tenor.com

One of my favourite public speakers making such elegant observations about one of my favourite films.

Past Present Future Podcast@ppfideas.bsky.social · 2y ago

NEW EPISODE OUT NOW! The second David Fincher film in our series is The Social Network (2010), the Aaron Sorkin-scripted take on how Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and the price paid by everyone else. Find us at...🎧 ppfideas.com

I’d love for the BBC to commission Hannah Fry to do a 6 part series on AI in 2025. She’s such an incredible science communicator, and now is the time for a big public dialogue on the technology.

Melanie Mitchell@melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 2y ago

Very good program exploring the notion of AI "superintelligence", w/ Hannah Fry talking with both doomers and doubters (including me). I love the conclusion: the real challenge is to understand our own (incredibly complex) intelligence. www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/...

And ultimately much of the work we wrote about is attempting to break away from a model of R&D that is hierarchical and target-driven. First sc from NNP biotech, second sc from the first NNP

So Chinese company Deepseek released their latest frontier grade LLM. Some astounding context worth repeating: -They only used 2000 GPUs on a budget of around $6m. This level of capability requires normally around a 16k GPU cluster -Deepseek is literally a project ran by a Chinese hedge fund!

Excellent post about the recent OpenAI o3 results on ARC (& other benchmarks). I don't know how @natolambert.bsky.social manages to write these so quickly! I highly recommend his newsletter. www.interconnects.ai/p/openais-o3... I am (more slowly) writing my own take on all this, coming soon.

o3: The grand finale of AI in 2024

A step change as influential as the release of GPT-4. Reasoning language models are the current big thing.

interconnects.ai

Great discussion including @pahlkadot.bsky.social and @andrewgreenway.bsky.social on success stories in state capacity in the U.K. One for the Bluesky Heads ™️ I think open.substack.com/pub/statecra...

Why is there a lot of disagreement amongst economists about AI productivity forecasts? This article suggests differences in assumptions around speed of adoption, and if this adoption is concentrated to a small number of sectors.

I would greatly appreciate submissions and shares of this, to help us motivate funders to support open source toolmaking for academic science. 🙏 #neuroskyence #neuroscience #neuroai #chemsky #compchem #compbio #hpc #machinelearning #ai

Flywheel@flywhl.dev · 2y ago

📣 Computational Scientists: What's broken in your research stack? - Wrestling with unwieldy HPC job scripts? - Spending hours converting between file formats? - Missing critical visualisation tools? Help us design better tools: flywhl-ideas.notion.site #science #openscience #academicsky #RSE

Exciting initiative. Two relevant points: 1.) Gaps in tooling are seen as a key blocker to improved capabilities + adoption. 2.) Another example of philanthropic orgs backing AI for R&D.

Terence Tao@teorth.bsky.social · 2y ago

Renaissance Philanthropy and XTX Markets have launched a $9.2 million "AI for Math fund" to support the development of new AI tools as long-term building blocks to advance mathematics. (I have agreed to serve on the advisory board for this fund.) renaissancephilanthropy.org/news-and-ins...