JASON WEBBER

The highest leverage person in an age of abundant intelligence may not be the one who produces the most answers. It may be the person who consistently asks: What is the actual problem hidden underneath the problem everyone else is trying to solve? Just as we define intelligence, we redefine it.

@cremieuxrecueil Anthropic are the busy body neighbour who lectures everybody on their gardens but secretly uses Round Up and Miracle Grow in overdose quantities.

What has Anthropic accomplished in biology so far? Not a lot.

@HarryStebbings Apparently the UK education system is ideally set up to create these people in their thousands and yet Peter Kyle is on a mission to find “ The Trillion Dollar Man”. In the age of Advanced Intelligence one thing is for sure, talk will recursively get ever cheaper.

"The best engineers in an AI world won't just ship features, they'll own outcomes. They'll understand customers, influence product adoption, and work across engineering, sales, marketing, and enablement to drive results. The engineers who thrive will be the ones who think like founders, not just builders." @matanSF Do you agree and does no one see that everyone should about what it will take to be a top engineer in 5 years @lennysan @sjwhitmore @jasonyuan @zan2434 @rsms

@RollingHedge I'm both reassured and at my wits end with these jokers. Reassured that they only have £500 m to squander on AI drones and police state tech but at my wits end because they have found quick sand to build on whilst those that know ( ahem), understand the substrate👀

“500 MILLION POUNDS” lmfao

@ns123abc I wonder where he got that information from?

BRO LITERALLY PREDICTED THIS

@fchollet There are many types of human but only very few humans can control the loop.

Near-term AI isn't fundamentally different from past tech waves. It's the newest form of digital leverage. It's a force multiplier, and force without direction is just noise. It still requires a human in the loop at every level in order to be useful.

Chester had a hydro electric power system running off of the Dee in 1900. The state of the art was Dinorwic in Snowdonia by the 1970s. The innovation is here, the brains are here, where is the logjam? The political machine. Commit to 5 huge nationwide projects that gave 1000s from around the country an opportunity. The last 50 years the failing plan is - commit to London- it will carry the country.

@myrddin_neuro Read about the Medog hydropower project in Tibet to be radicalised about the scale of change the UK needs in the next decade. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hyd…

A few words on the Sovereign AI debate, having built several LLMs in Meta while in the UK and now working as a UK based startup: 1. Lots of people are trying to do the right thing to make the UK a better place to start AI companies. Time lags until the benefit show, but you should judge on the intent now. I support the direction of travel! 2. DeepMind has been enormously beneficial for the UK, but it has muddied the waters for a sovereign LLM company to emerge as (until recently) the Government continued to celebrate it as a British achievement / push it as a national champion. 3. Similarly, people are now celebrating recent US investment in King’s Cross, while also wanting more UK sovereignty. Clearly some income effects here, but I would worry about the substitution effects too. AI is not like other types of foreign investment. 4. The relevant talent nexuses in UK that could develop a competitive foundation model are from GDM and old Meta AI GenAI. Also some folks from smaller groups, ex Conjecture, Stability. The talent is still there, although a lot was snapped up by US FM companies in the past year. I personally think it’s not too difficult to develop new talent either from UK universities, but you probably need an ex GDM or Meta core (Gemini or Llama). Or if not: show evidence first (technical reports) before claiming you can do it. 5. Building an LLM is very different from doing regular AI research - skillset is different. Former is closer to engineering; long hours, often unsexy work. Important to distinguish between these two types of talent in the UK ecosystem; arguably too much focus on the latter / ideas guys. 6. On research - DeepSeek R1 post-train cost $300k . Yes, they also needed an ablation budget and to train a base model, invest in infra and talent - and yes the cost of an R1 moment is increasing year on year - but the idea that you need $1bn plus immediately to show results is complete FUD. You need billions to scale, not to validate new directions. 7. In my experience, every failed LLM effort (from model results perspective) I witnessed in the past came from a combination of poor leadership, politics, unclear vision, and premature scaling. Good efforts usually started from small teams who had worked with each other for a long time, had shared thesis, and scaled progressively in bite-sized pieces. Some recent lessons here for neolabs as well. 8. Things take time. Eg we’ve spent ~12 months mostly on internal infra just to get into the position to be able to make big swings. It’s important to nurture new companies through the initial phase. Expectation management is also crucial. I think expecting new UK companies to have single big bang releases is very dangerous; sort of like overwatering a plant. The correct release pattern is “decent”. “decent”, “decent”, “quite good actually”, “holy shit”. 9. Please don’t allow politicians or journalists to kill recent or upcoming AI investment efforts. We will need way more - at the price of potential inefficiency in places - as AI is existential for the country. Ambitious projects are usually incredibly fragile in the early stages; look after them! 10. Mythos is a good triggering moment, but what’s coming will make it look like a toy, so it’s worth building for what’s coming in 5 years time - not a current generation model. Very proud to be building in the UK - more to share on that soon - alongside many other great early stage AI companies! 🇬🇧

This is a mindset that has infected Great Britain since 1980, hard to believe it was the country that turned dreams in to reality. Can do became Can’t do.

A Warning: Focus on 9. That's the barrier for Great Britain. Historically the political and journalistic set were critical to the success of a British inspired technological achievement. From Stephensons Rainhill trial, to Cobb, Campbell, Concorde and F1, the politicos / journalists were needed to translate the vision. Now Advanced Intelligence systems must actively avoid this class, they will taint and suppress any achievement.

@beffjezos Agreed, but those fine lines that separated Jobs from Gates will now become nanofibre thin. Right now there's Elon and the rest. @shaunmmaguire needs to be looking for the next step change, envisionary.

If your deep tech CEO isn't 1) a grand visionary 2) a hardcore grinder operator 3) a technical genius 4) an amazing salesman Then you're NGMI

@KanishkaNarayan @Peston Please Stop ⛔ All you're doing is gathering people to stare at the moon and telling them it's the sun.

A simple argument, made two months ago to @Peston: the central question for our national security and sovereignty is the question of our AI capability. Even more urgent today than in April.

@ProudofusUK One of the greats, his political stance is interesting. Although he might see something alien in the current viewpoint of his descendants @hilarybennmp

"Am I not a Man? And a Brother?" 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 The most famous image of the fight against slavery was made in a Staffordshire pottery. Josiah Wedgwood was the most famous potter in England. Born in Burslem in 1730, he turned pottery into an industry: division of labour, costed processes, and a heat gauge for his kilns so good the Royal Society made him a Fellow in 1783. Then he used all of it for something that mattered. In 1787 he joined the new Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and commissioned a small jasperware medallion: a kneeling African man in chains, hands raised, and 5 words around the rim. "Am I not a man and a brother?" He paid for them himself. He never sold one. He gave away thousands, and shipped a batch across the Atlantic to Benjamin Franklin. People wore them as brooches, hairpins, and snuff boxes. To wear it was to say, without a word, where you stood. It became the badge of the whole movement. Arguably the first political logo in history. And every ribbon, wristband and awareness pin since traces back to a potter in Staffordshire who decided to use his kiln for something more than dinner plates. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ He could have stuck to selling china to the rich. He chose to hand a movement its face instead. This is the revival of British culture. Be part of it. 👉 proudofus.co.uk/support 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

@signulll Darios legacy: He took the idiom “ Once bitten twice as shy” applied recursion and created “ Once bitten 3.14 recurring”.

i suspect anthropic will put out a long blog post tomorrow to highlight the specifics around both the actual vulnerability & the underlying set of events from their perspective. although i’m really really tired of this.

I'm working on a bare bones hypothesis that comes out of this. A minute subset of people comfortably function at a level where they can flow within the river( society) as the Thalweg. They are able to carry out Root Cause Analysis and convert it into Cause and Effect. When we introduce advanced intelligence to the equation through ML and new technological advances the equation moves to another dimension. You can formalise the hypothesis as:- Observation → Cause → Root Cause → System Structure → Hidden Dimensions → New Optimisation Space Most people stop at Cause, a few will be comfortable at RCA. The unusual discoveries will occur at Hidden Dimensions. Tao is doing work here( but they aren't really hidden) ML just allows a fluid flow out of the hypothesis- It makes sense of the nonsense. @sebkrier @tszzl @MillionInt @dioscuri

A poorly appreciated feature of the singularity is that "how do we govern AI" is only ONE of the importance governance questions, and it is so bright and blinding and imminent that it is making us ignore the other technologies that will come online with less time for debate

Once AI becomes part of human cognition, sovereignty ceases to be purely territorial. It becomes cognitive. The game changes a new layer is added to the historical stack:- For now call it Advanced AI Literacy. Historically those who gatekept information controlled the system. The senators, the monks, the monarchs, the parliamentarians, the think tanks, the lobbyists, The NGOs ( WEF, UN etc). The old systems CAN NOT control AI. So to quote @Dominic2306 “ The system working as intended” is malfunctioning- for those that plot this once in history phenomenon- it is a consequence of The Law Of Inevitabilty- as intended.

1. if transacting with superintelligent models outside of the boundaries of a lab becomes difficult due to national security / ai safety concerns and so on, it will mean the Coasean boundaries of the labs will grow to encompass all interesting industry, creating a truly cyberpunk chaebol-capitalism type of future, where the goverment sort of runs them but they also sort of run the government 2. as if there weren't already enough reasons to break up your family, leave your home, the Zone of Thought will increase the attractiveness of migrating to try and have your child on american soil, so they can have 1000x the effective brain power of people born elsewhere 3. every country should probably try and either work towards a new ai security pact with the americans immediately or pool every ounce of national resources to try and create their own ASI labs lest you become complete intellectual, economic, and moral vassals to the united states of america and the output byproducts its ASIs (you wont even get to talk to them). if they succeeded (big if) this will imply a more global race and more risk factors than was previously implied by the formerly only "beating china" narrative -- but many will prefer it to the superintelligent monopolar value lock-in 4. the other alternative is to keep the tension between safety and concentration of power at the top of mind and for the government/labs to push for solving it, rather than instrumentalizing all other values to be subservient to minimizing ai harms. insofar as safety means defending properties of the fragile world we like, the diffuse nature of power is one of those properties 5. historically the americans have been really quite Benign about their global public goods hegemony despite the ability to extract significantly more rents than they do, and it makes it easy for people of all stripes to fight for america rather than under it. we probably don't have to, but i hope america overall works towards export promotion of american models rather than export control

@SkyNews @rowlsmanthorpe Only 24 hours behind the curve. By Sunday morning expect this story to be about the “ evil Musk” and his connection to Anthropic. Ed Davey will be on the couch demanding that Musk is a danger to UK online behaviour and should be arrested.

Anthropic has withdrawn its powerful Fable 5 model after the US government ordered the company to revoke access to all foreign nationals Anthropic itself described Mythos, Fable 5's base model, as "too powerful". @rowlsmanthorpe reports

@pmarca From uninteresting to extremely interesting file this at a moderately.

Interesting.

@s8mb Deluded. The best system will always gravitate to the US. Market forces always trumps compliance.

This is, perversely, good news for Britain, Australia, Japan, Europe, and other countries being cut off that would once have seen themselves as close allies of the United States. It shows us what the future may hold if AI is the strategically and economically decisive technology of the 21st century and is controlled by the US and China. It is good news because *it may be happening early enough to give us time to act.* I think this will be rescinded pretty soon, but it’s a sign of things to come. In a future where frontier models cannot be used outside the US, our industries and economies will fall behind and American businesses may not be able to operate overseas. We won’t be able to defend ourselves militarily with defence systems built on obsolete software. Europe 2031 is a good scenario of what a future like this could mean: europe2031.ai Some of the things we need to do are ‘no regrets’ measures we should do anyway. But some are genuinely costly and risky. We need cheap electricity – powered by gas, coal (this is costly, coal is very bad), deregulated nuclear fission – whatever can provide *cheap, reliable, 24/7* power. This almost certainly excludes wind power, which is enormously expensive and unreliable. We need projects to be able to connect to the grid in days rather than years by paying for fast-track connections. We need to make it incredibly easy to build data centres, with the property taxes retained locally and hypothecated for local tax cuts so there is some direct benefit for locals. This doesn’t need to be nationwide. We need to create new regulatory regimes for innovative businesses that give them the right to hire and fire staff with ease. The difficulty and cost of firing staff is one of the main reasons Europe has fallen behind so badly. We need to create a parallel employment regime that companies and workers can opt in to: worksinprogress.co/issue/why-euro… Even though I think it will probably fail, I think we should probably try to create a good, non-American frontier AI lab. I am quite pessimistic about this – even extremely well-resourced, innovative software companies are struggling to do this. But the stakes are so high that not trying seems foolish. One thing that might work in our favour is the number of brilliant AI engineers who are not US citizens, who under the current export controls do not have access to Mythos/Fable even if they live and work in the US. What happens to Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, and the many other Europeans, Canadians, etc who are working on AI models in Britain and America who are affected by this? I do not think we should force our own companies to use model, because this would exacerbate their economic weakness – this lab should have to compete on an even playing field. I am deeply sceptical that this can work, but we cannot rule it out. If we do it, it has to be able to pay US salaries, operate without political constraints. worksinprogress.co/issue/how-airb… It is cope to tell yourself that Trump is an aberration or that these export controls are a one-off. To repeat, I think these specific controls will be lifted quickly and it will be easy to move on and forget it happened. But this is a look into a potential future. Every one of us that is not a US citizen is at risk. The standard political divides do not apply here; the question is whether you grasp the enormity of AI as a technology. We have to act!

To quote the great Fred Ebb and John Kander:- They had it comin' (they had it comin') They had it comin' (they had it comin') They had it comin' all along (they had it comin' all along) I didn't do it (she didn't do it) But if I'd done it (but if she'd done it) How could you tell me that I was wrong

let me be very clear this is bad for everyone. this is silly. the fault is exclusively with dario. for various reasons the temptation to never use anthropic products again is incredibly strong

@TomTugendhat Sit this one out mate. It will unfold many orders and layers above your pay grade.

Disabling Fable 5 and other models for foreigners is not a misunderstanding or a mistake, it’s the inevitable result of technology shaping warfare so that sovereignty is more about code than cannons. With high energy costs and the emphasis on safety not opportunity Britain’s response has been to build the brake cutting ourselves off from the future and tied ourselves to the past. We cannot continue like this and remain sovereign.

@jujulemons Be the steeplejack - looking down on the commentariat.

The UK commentariat will spend this week deluded about the Anthropic situation. “It’s just Trump.” “It’s a one-off.” “We can build our own.” “We don’t want or need crappy American AI anyway.” None of it holds up. US has been using AI as a geopolitical lever since 2022. Chip controls, model weight restrictions, Chip Security Act embedding trackers directly into hardware, and now model restrictions. The direction of travel is clear. The UK has four AI Growth Zones, two without delivery partners, and OpenAI paused its Stargate UK data centre in April. Powering a data centre here costs four times what it does in the US. It is illegal to build LLMs that could compete with Claude because we cannot train models in the UK under our copyright laws. The idea we will build our own infrastructure under business as usual is unrealistic. We need to adopt. We need the productivity gains. Debt servicing costs are at historic highs, the tax burden is already at a 70-year peak, and the OBR’s long-run projections assume some productivity recovery. If professional services (the one sector generating real trade surplus) gets automated away by American AI while UK firms lag on adoption, the fiscal math becomes genuinely dire. Under current trajectories, we will arrive late, dependent on foreign infrastructure, with no domestic capability and no leverage. Nobody is taking this seriously enough and I’m feeling despondent.