Alexandru Voica 💀

How much water do data centres really use in the UK? Sky's technology correspondent @rowlsmanthorpe visits a "waterless" data centre in London and reveals how much water data centres use in the UK and why the issue is more complicated than it first appears. 🔗Full report: trib.al/6tZngAd

@firstadopter x.com/alexvoica/stat…

Catnip for media

My eyes rolled so hard, it cured my glaucoma.

Today, @synthesiaIO is announcing a partnership with @CinderPlatform to extend and improve our trust and safety stack: synthesia.io/post/partnerin… Cinder lets our trust and safety team keep pace with how fast the product and the threat landscape are moving. It adds a second pass on every model decision, retrains on every reviewer action, and offers agentic capabilities that complement our in-house moderation team. We are also sharing the numbers for how our content moderation systems are performing in our yearly Futuresafe responsible creation report which can be downloaded from security.synthesia.io. In 2025, our automated tooling reviewed more than 11.5 million pieces of content and removed 841,957 that violated our policies. Automated review volume grew roughly 77% year on year, while content reaching human reviewers fell, so people now concentrate on appeals and genuine judgement calls. We processed 12,450 appeals and reversed about 31% of them. The context for why this matters showed up a few weeks ago. Belgian public broadcaster RTBF tested AI video tools for an investigation into AI-driven scams. Synthesia blocked the creation of non-consensual deepfakes, political propaganda, racist and xenophobic content, and crypto investment scams. Several other platforms generated all of them, as seen in the video below. The result above reflects an approach we've held since 2017: moderation at the point of creation, rather than just cleanup after distribution. Thanks to @itsGlenWise and the Cinder team for the partnership!

@izakaminska x.com/alexvoica/stat…

The EU is only open to working with "like-minded" partners on AI and digitalisation from now on. ec.europa.eu/commission/pre…

One of my favorite @CVPR papers comes from @fahadshamshad_, @NilsLukas7 and @karthik_nanda: Introducing RAVEN, a zero-shot diffusion-based framework that removes invisible watermarks from images without degrading perceptual visual quality. cvpr.thecvf.com/virtual/2026/o… #CVPR2026

MP sues Musk’s xAI in UK test case over fake sexual images ft.trib.al/snwSVSB

This is how some people behave in Harpenden. Why do this to your own town and community?

Today, I walked past the Old Street roundabout on my way to a SXSW London side event, and saw @synthesiaIO on a billboard with some of the best companies Europe has ever produced. I'll admit it gave me a much-needed energy boost ahead of speaking on yet another panel about AI's problems. The billboard is part of #BuiltinEurope, a campaign @balderton has launched to tell the truth about what is happening right now in European tech. The story we've heard for years has been one of catching up. Europe could lead, the headlines said, if only it had fixed this or that. That's because building in Europe was treated as a thing you had to overcome. Now, for the first time in a long while, the opposite is true. Met with indifference at best and opposition at worst at home, European founders are forced to build companies that work everywhere from the first day, and they're doing it with style (and substance). At Synthesia we feel this in our bones. We were built in London and we have been global from the start, because being European made that the only sensible way to think. So if you have ever thought about building a company in Europe, or joining one, consider this your invitation. builtineurope.com is now live, with a jobs platform pulling together open roles from a thousand European startups, and a directory of the continent's best incubators for anyone ready to start something of their own. Europe is building. Come build with us.

@DigitalEU @HennaVirkkunen Might be a bit underbaked, please consider keeping it in the oven a bit more. x.com/alexvoica/stat…

Something is cooking 👀, right @HennaVirkkunen? Stay tuned!

From the people who brought you compute thresholds as the main way to decide AI system capability, now comes the "Scientific Panel!" I think I'm going to pass.

@NXT4EU @synthesiaIO @balderton No one says we shouldn't promote European champions - in fact, I'm all for it. But *how* you do it matters, and right now we're doing it badly in the EU: x.com/i/status/20566…

@alexvoica @synthesiaIO @balderton Why is it not ok when the EU-Nations push for homegrown solutions, when the US does the same? It is important to have a level playing ground, otherwise the US will continue dominating.

To be clear, @synthesiaIO is proud to be part of Built in Europe and the case @balderton makes is the right one. I am less comfortable when that ambition gets folded or confused with the version of sovereignty taking shape in Brussels, where the instinct is to reduce reliance on foreign technology through procurement rules, subsidies, and a thickening layer of complex and overlapping regulation. Real sovereignty comes from building generational companies strong enough to win on open ground. Shielding them from competition only swaps one dependence for another and creates inferior products and services at higher costs. We need more of the former, and less of the latter.

I trained as an engineer because I expected to spend my career building things, and for a while that's exactly what I did (debugging the MMU of the Cortex-A7 was the most fun I've ever had!). What I didn't expect was how much I'd come to care about the questions sitting one level above the engineering. Who gets to decide how a technology is used, what rules it should answer to, how you explain something genuinely new to people whose job is to govern it. The first time I got pulled into that kind of work, I found it far more interesting than anything on my own to-do list, and I kept finding reasons to get involved in public affairs. Eventually I stopped pretending it was a detour, and made it a full time job. That path led me to corporate affairs at @synthesiaIO, which is where I get to do this every day, at a company building technology that policymakers, regulators, the press, and the public are all still forming a view on. So this autumn I'm starting a postgraduate degree in Computer and Communications Law at @LondonU. AI is reshaping the rules it operates under in real time, and a lot of the most important conversations happening right now apply to laws that were never written for today's technological change. So I want to understand the foundations more deeply, and I think anyone doing this work at an AI company should. I'm grateful to Synthesia for backing me on this. Being somewhere that treats your growth as worth investing in is rarer than it should be, and it's not something I take lightly!

Victor Riparbelli, last night on @bbcquestiontime when asked how AI is impacting jobs: "When you look at what is most valuable in society, it is generally what is the most scarce. And what's about to happen right now is that what has been very scarce, which is software development, that will be much easier to do with technology. And I think the value of human relations and human connection is going to go up very, very significantly." @synthesiaIO #bbcqt

How does one decide that a technology is "environmentally ruinous?" By that standard, the digital footprint of The Canary is equally ruinous and they should shut down their online operations.