Bill Leaver

People like to talk about doing what they believe to be the right thing for their country. Ian gave up his home run investment of a lifetime to do it. Heroic. 🫡

Fukuyama was so prescient. In a society with strong rights and material comfort, but light on demanding shared purposes and some degree of sacrifice, thymotic energies go searching. Some quiet into bourgeois hedonism; other will seek “metaphorical wars” and eventually real ones.

@adamshuaib Related to this, great founders have an under developed sense of cringe. This is something that constrains great founder production in the UK compared with the US

Many of the best founders share a trait that traditional managers would see as a red flag: they have a very low need for social approval. Most people are terrified of looking like a fool or bothering people, but great founders will send ten follow-up emails to a dream hire or pitch their idea to a stranger in an elevator without a second thought. This personality quirk means they can bypass the politeness filter that slows down most people. In a startup's early days, the biggest bottleneck is often the founder’s own hesitation to ask for help, capital or feedback. A founder who isn't slowed down by the fear of being annoying can compress a year’s worth of networking into a month or even a week. When you are vetting a founding team, look for signs of this shameless persistence.

@obrien @SebJohnsonUK @mikebutcher Well done for correction

Update: I was wrong. @SebJohnsonUK and @mikebutcher were right. SAP paid 700 cash upfront 300 earnout Balderton did x17, so >100M proceeds, all cash At 40 technical people, basically 20M/head. It's GAFAM acquihire money. Then spend another €1bn on scaling.

@RianCFFWhitton Excellent as always

Now on Substack. Britain doesn't need an especially complicated industrial policy. Big capital grants (£1 billion per year) for machine tools would make a huge difference. open.substack.com/pub/riancwhitt…

According to Natural England's modelling, the fish disco will save just 0.083 salmon and 0.028 sea trout per year. That works out to over £280,000 per fish saved. For £700 million, we could wipe out Somerset’s £41 million council deficit for a decade, fix every single pothole in the county, build a rail link to Minehead, and make every bus in Somerset free for years. Or we could just make the electricity that Hinkley produces cheaper, and we'd all benefit. Being a poor country is a choice.

@chris_j_paxton Great post

This week saw dramatic scaling announcements with factory images from 1X and Figure, plus a couple other cool reveals from RobotEra and Tutor Intelligence. More than any other recent week it feels like scaling of humanoids and semi-humanoids is really picking up. More in the blog post: open.substack.com/pub/itcanthink…

Hardly a month goes by without me thinking about how prescient this essay (and the talks Ian gave) were back in 2017/18. If you haven't read it, do now. If you have, read it again. Mundane now, but almost shocking then. ianhogarth.com/blog/2018/6/13… An under-appreciated part of the UK getting its AI safety infrastructure & international engagement right was benefiting from people like Ian (and Matt Clifford, Jade Leung, Nitarshan Rajkumar, Henry De Zoete) giving up their time to make things happen that would not have happened otherwise. (And all had very good, much better-paying, alternative uses for their time). Grateful.

@colossusmag Excellent piece

The third best-selling computer platform in history, after Windows PCs and the Mac, began as a recruiting tool for Cambridge University's computer science department. It's the size of a credit card, has no case, and costs less than a pair of shoes. Eben Upton built Raspberry Pi in 2012 to get more applicants into Cambridge's computer science course, then the easiest to get into. He thought kids needed the real thing: a general purpose programmable computer (like his childhood BBC Micro) to fall in love with the unbounded creativity of coding. He was more right than he could have imagined. On launch day in 2012, he sold 100,000 computers. A million shipped before Raspberry Pi hired an employee. Computer science is now the hardest course to get into at Cambridge, and Raspberry Pi is a $1.5 billion public company that has sold over 73 million units. 80% of its revenue comes from industry. Every digital display at Heathrow runs on a Pi. Schindler uses them in its elevators. The International Space Station has carried one in orbit since 2015. You'll also find the tiny computers wherever the next thing is. Bitcoin mining farms ran on them. So did the first wave of hobbyist drones. Pis now run LLMs. In five years, Upton thinks Claude Sonnet-class intelligence will fit in your pocket. Most tech conversation is about the frontier: the newest chips, the biggest models, trillion-dollar training runs. Raspberry Pi is a case study in the opposite. It shows what cheap, general-purpose, and performant-enough can achieve. It's also a rare British hardware success story, designed in Cambridge, manufactured with Sony in Wales, and reshored from China a decade before the rest of the industry caught on. Read @TerranMott's interview with Upton below. It comes with extraordinary photos of Pis baking in the Welsh factory, and covers the journey of automation, teaching children to program in the era of agents, and putting foundation models in your pocket.

Wittgenstein's (incredibly typical) response to a university friend taking him for a cheerful afternoon out to watch a boat race:

For those who enjoy "UK stand up tall!" type content

In my teens and 20's I would spend way too much time playing Starcraft and Civilization. Harvesting resources, building things, and expanding was super addictive to my brain - to an almost unhealthy degree. Later I realized that entrepreneurship and business is the ultimate game. It scratches the same itch for me (resources, building, expanding), but you're actually contributing to humanity at the end of the day, which can be much more fulfilling. Business is also much more positive sum than video games. In Starcraft, the other player has to lose for you to win. In business, there is competition, but in a growing market there can be multiple winners. And gains compound long term (it's a infinite game) instead of starting over each time. Now days I prefer to watch pros play video games to unwind, instead of playing video games myself. But a quick game can still be fun here and there to unwind. By contrast, the game of business is played over many decades.

Starcraft is an incredible foundation for entrepreneurship. It wired my brain at an early age to think about ROI, APM, macro, micro, the benefit of keeping your minerals at $0. It is no coincidence that many of the great founders of this generation have played this game. Here is my APM (actions per minute) tracker that I use for playing the startup game (had it closed for a couple days -- I still APM on the weekend). One of the things you learn playing SC is that there is a base level of APM needed to be successful. The speed at which you can plan and act on a computer is a lot faster than most people realize. It's not everything. But if you aren't hitting a minimum level you will just get overwhelmed and get crushed.

@SebJohnsonUK @matthewclifford @vriparbelli @matiii @jamesdacombe Great vid

Britain has always been great. The telescope, jet engine and world wide web were all invented here. And now, a new generation is rising. Entrepreneurs like @vriparbelli, @matiii, and @jamesdacombe are building the technologies of the future from right here. There's more to be done and there's more to be built, but I love this country and I love seeing it trying to solve the hardest problems in the world. LETS GO Clips taken from @KanishkaNarayan and @matthewclifford's speech at @lfg_uk

Strait of Hormuz: A CitriniResearch Field Trip The Field Report from Analyst #3 is live. citriniresearch.com/p/strait-of-ho…

@Discoplomacy Please do

Five chapters in, so far enjoyable read. Familiar territory if you watched the GDM doc. Good to be reminded of two of the best computer games ever made (outside of Rome Total War and Medieval II). Might do short thread on book after I finish it.

Let’s go

Excellent from @packyM and @PimDeWitte: notboring.co/p/world-models

Within the scope of easily simulate-able tasks, a purely sim-trained policy outperforms SOTA VLAs trained on thousands of hours of real data! I was very fortunate to work with @rosemhendrix, Abhay and other brilliant collaborators @allen_ai on this effort! Data engine, model checkpoints, and everything else will be open sourced (soon). allenai.org/blog/molmobot

friend is in the stage of claude psychosis where he asks claude to send him newspapers about what claude is doing for him

@skulthorp @dispatch__media Excellent piece

An anthropologist recently told me that the places and people that used to send the rank and file to the British army "no longer seemed to exist." For @dispatch__media I went to look for them...