Nick Swanson

@s8mb Not widely sold, but Sainsbury's stocks this stuff and it's lovely too.

Is this the best widely-sold lager available in Britain? I believe it might be.

@AnEmergentI Good man

Pranay is the 'real deal'. If you are interested in how to create transformative R&D programs, the chance to work with him is I think worth dropping what you are doing and applying for. Highly recommend.

My team (Frontier Strategy & Governance) at Google DeepMind is hiring. We are bringing on researchers to lead our strategic analysis on frontier AI. Our mission is to provide rigorous foresight and actionable insights to help the world prepare for advanced AI. We focus on concrete, longer-horizon challenges that fall outside the ordinary course of business: forecasting technical breakthroughs, anticipating geopolitical dynamics, contributing to the development of international safety standards, and planning scientific moonshots. We also publish external research and convene experts. Recent public work covers lessons from historical technological revolutions, forecasting frameworks for frontier AI, Cooperative AI, and the limits of model-level governance. This builds on our team's track record of co-creating the Frontier Model Forum, the Frontier Safety Framework, and the AGI Safety Council. We are seeking candidates with deep expertise in domains such as AI governance, international security, political economy, compute governance, forecasting, and institutional design. You will need the analytical skill to translate complex technical and political trends into internal briefings, external publications, and company initiatives. Experience briefing executive leadership is highly valued. London is preferred, with hubs in NYC and the Bay Area. We are targeting mid-career and senior researchers, though exceptional early-career applicants are considered. Apply here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/jobs/…

Start a company in AI for Science. The Encode: AI for Science fellowship offers a year of freedom to build what matters -- salary, 100k GBP of compute, and partnership with the top scientists in the UK. No equity or fees, it's a fully funded fellowship! Apply by March 28

really great @britishprogress opp here could be a great fit for anyone in partnerships / sales / BD keen to work on accelerating UK growth & dynamism £60-65k happy to chat if any Qs

New York Spelling Bee Champions, you’ll never sing that

We’re excited to unveil the name of our new London building: Platform 37. 📍 The name honors both the surrounding area’s transport heritage and "Move 37" – the critical moment where our AI system AlphaGo showed it could find novel solutions humans hadn't considered.

Enjoyed the recent @PPFIdeas episode about societal collapse with the author of Goliath's Curse, and always enjoy David's takes on the state/Leviathan and AI/techno-capital. I'd love to hear him discuss AI from the opposite angle though - rather than characterising AI as a 'top down' centralising force at some point in competition with the state, exploring (a) the impact of the complexity burden of society/the economy as it currently exists, (b) individually loyal, delegate-agents and their ability to make the world more legible to and controllable by individuals, (c) the new ways humans will be able to transact with one another, and the granularity of bilateral and societal choice (d) the democratisation of capacity and capability. Rather than a 'silicon Goliath', millions of 'silicon Davids'.

🚨 We’re hiring: Data Analyst 🚨 Join us @BritishProgress to source, clean and analyse UK policy data and turn it into clear charts and sharp written analysis that drives our research programme. We’re looking for someone quantitatively rigorous, AI-native in their workflow, and genuinely interested in public policy. £33,000 - £38,000 | London (80 Strand) | 4 days in office Applications reviewed on a rolling basis: 👉 britishprogress.org/opportunities/…

The METR timelines are being discussed in House of Lords: hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2026-02-…

Handy Glossary for the Citrini Essay: Ghost GDP → Consumer Surplus, but spooky Intelligence Displacement Spiral → Productivity Growth, the thing we've been desperately seeking since 2010 Habitual Intermediation → Switching costs (bad) Agent on Agent Violence → Competition, but imaged between different actors within a lump of labour fallacy Intelligence Premium Unwind → Lower barriers (and costs) to economically valuable activities

If the incentives were different - this kind of reporting would be in the mainstream. Reporting and opinion which actually takes an interest in the subject matter it reports and opines on! Kudos to the @ReadTransformer team for what they're building.

AGI = "automatically deleted 10,000 emails I had no intention of reading" and "automatically sorted my downloaded PDFs"

All of my thoughts take the form of fully formatted emails, so I have no need for AI assistance. "Hi -- Further to my previous thoughts. What a beautiful sunny day, I am so glad to be alive. Best regards, Nick"

Seeing lots of people (or bots) attacking Ryanair, which I assume they only recently learned about the existence of, because they aren't planning to install Starlink (very impressive technology, no doubt) on a famously low cost airline, is so very boring. It's at best worthy of a small sensationalist reference in a tabloid, but instead I scroll through high temperature arguments about an airline's IT procurement decisions, and how Europe is economically doomed because its citizens can't go online during a 1 hour flight, on a purposefully, famously, incredibly cheap airline. I don't have enough space in my tiny brain.

NEW @BritishProgress and @LabourTogether report! Project Hawking: how the Government can go big on Britain’s strengths and triple the economy of the Oxford–Cambridge Corridor.

I'm hiring at DeepMind AGI Safety! Looking for research engineers to help assess catastrophic risks from frontier models. Our work directly informs safety cases and governance. Lon/SF/NYC - engineers/scientists both wanted

Guest essay on the blog by @sebkrier on what advanced AI will mean for jobs. Séb is AGI policy dev lead at DeepMind, and is a must-follow for his posts on how AI will impact society. In the essay, Séb argues that full labor displacement--or full substitution--requires a bunch of extreme assumptions to hold true simultaneously. Human labor share will remain a substantial part of the economy a lot longer than the AGI-maximalist timelines suggest because 1) complementarities will persist for quite a while and 2) economic value is not determined solely by efficiency--human involvement is often an integral part of a service/product's value. While full substitution may occur at some point down the line, it should not be the "default assumption" or starting point, as the underlying assumptions are extremely fragile. Rather, it may happen gradually and continuously, with "cyborgism" lasting quite a long time. It's an excellent essay, and you can read it in full here: aleximas.substack.com/p/the-cyborg-e… And if you like this type of content, do consider subscribing to the blog: aleximas.substack.com

Conflating "humanity" and "moral worth" with "legal standing" is confused and worth thinking about. Assigning some forms of AI legal status in some limited form in the future might in fact be a very sensible way to enable / simplify / automate redress and disputes - it's what we do already with limited companies (which are a form of artificial intelligence made of human sub-agents). No one thinks supermarket chains have immortal souls, their legal standing is a functional designation to allow it to trade, enter contracts, access insurance, and to hold it accountable. The idea that current AI is sentient and due moral consideration is a minority-held view and a separate conversation. Legal standing is not the same as assigning chatbots 'human rights' (or some new equivalent), and could be achieved as it is with limited companies, in a way which doesn't remove humans. You could legitimately hold the view that AI shouldn't be able to do some (or any) social/economic activities. But that is an (interesting!) political question which is worth answering, and not dismissing because the models aren't 'alive'. And just to be clear, I don't think any of this is what Bengio was talking about in the cited quote - his concern seems to be having the ability to switch off the models for safety reasons. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…