James Wise

@dc_lawrence This is much better than I get - my 3 year old when asked what his dad does said ‘tap tap blah blah’

The joy of having a 2.5 year old who has an extremely vague sense of what I get up to during the day.

And it includes this banger for anyone who went to primary school in Greater Manchester:

As someone who similarly spent too many Friday nights around the Cineworld in Stockport before the regeneration - I can confirm this is the best read on ‘Manchesterism’ I’ve come across so far. Its one of the few pieces that properly recognises the role of Sir Howard Bernstein:

When Britain lets you build, (as we have mostly done in tech/ AI) then by god we build:

@SebJohnsonUK @tedpersson Ted is great and a long-standing investor in UK & European frontier tech.

EQT has just been chosen to manage the €5bn European Scaleup Fund. All I can say is THANK GOD the European Commission finally made its mind up. The decision has been dragging on (in very european fashion) for months. It's now been decided that @tedpersson and Victor Englesson will co-lead the fund. @eqt has €269 billion in total assets under management, and has invested in companies like Lovable, Parloa, Nothing, and the The Exploration Company. The Fund will invest across the EU and other countries in European technology scaleups, across digital systems, industrial systems and life sciences, from Series B onwards. EQT and Atomico were the final two firms in the running to manage the fund. I would love to hear what VCs think about it - either publicly or privately!

Took some time this week to speak in a longer format with @johnthornhillft on a counter-intuitive topic in the current news cycle - British excellence. - Shared some thoughts on how venture is changing and how @balderton has adapted. - Why we should fight the ‘default to Delaware’ mindset - How & why Britain and Europe must build soveriegn AI capabilities. - What’s resonated with the launch of @UKSovereignAI, and the incredible support we’ve received so far. There’s lots to fix - but we’ve made a hell of start. Link below.

@GroundFloor_hq @goodwin_ml And ARM of course…..

@Jameswise @goodwin_ml Finally a UK chip company, interested to see how it develops

There’s a good chance Fractile will do for Bristol what Deepmind has done for Kings Cross. Incredible work and congratulations @goodwin_ml and team Fractile.

Big congratulations to Walter and team! Amazing work. Really feels like we’re entering a golden age for UK AI 🇬🇧🚀

@WoodstockComp @goodwin_ml Yes takes a village

@Jameswise @goodwin_ml I like to think GraphCore being DeepMind & SoftBank being the Bristol equivalent of Alphabet. But Fractile is truly a fantastic business. Onwards and upwards!

@_rockt @Recursive_SI Congratulations Tim!

Excited to co-found Recursive (@recursive_si) with an exceptional team in London and SF to create AI that experiments on how to safely improve itself, turning compute into knowledge that accumulates in an open-ended process of endless, automated scientific discoveries.

Yesterday, we kicked off our May tour in Newcastle at Atom bank! The event brought together founders, investors, students and ecosystem leaders from across the North East. A massive thank you @SunSoftCity and @NorthEast_CA for helping to organise. It was fantastic to connect with so many incredible founders building in the North East.

This was just bought to my attention Ed. I used "pause AI" for brevity which I think is fair. Specifically the survey says only 13% are in a segment which is “by far the most anti-technology of the six segments. They are deeply pessimistic about the role technology will play in shaping the future and hold very low levels of trust in tech companies. Rather than seeing technology as a public good, they view it as a problem that requires strict regulation". As the report states tech positivity is much higher in general. Personally I think the broader message stands but your critique of the accuracy of this specific sentence is fair.

The Chair of the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund, writing in The Times yesterday, misrepresented polling data on AI - a mistake I think is significant enough to flag. Arguing that ‘Britain must embrace AI’, he said a poll last year suggested ‘only 13% of Britons wanted to “pause AI” development’. But this is false: the poll in question didn’t ask about pausing AI development at all. I’ve read the poll. The 13% figure he cites seems to be the pollsters’ own segmentation of a group they called ‘Tech Sceptics’ - which they created based on people’s answers to a range of questions, none of which asked about pausing AI. These included asking the extent to which people agreed with statements like “Britain needs to move fast in adopting new technologies". This was an op-ed in a leading national paper. It is obvious that polling showing low public appetite for pausing AI might be an attractive thing to include if you're making the argument he was making. But only if that polling actually exists. People will rightly believe the stats they read in The Times are true. So it is important they are - particularly when the author chairs a £500M taxpayer-funded unit, and is writing about questions of national AI policy.

We're very fortunate to have @demishassabis, @maxjaderberg and the incredible team building Isomorphic based here in the UK - but on a mission to improve health across the globe. Delighted that @UKSovereignAI will be supporting them on this journey.

I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. That work started with AlphaFold, and now at @IsomorphicLabs with the mission to reimagine drug discovery and one day solve all disease! We are turbocharging that goal with $2.1B in new funding.

Today marks a pivotal moment for Isomorphic Labs. We have secured $2.1 Billion in our second external funding round, led by Thrive Capital. They are joined at the table by Alphabet, GV and new investors MGX, Temasek, CapitalG and the UK Sovereign AI Fund. This milestone accelerates our ability to build the pioneering novel AI models that power our AI drug design engine (IsoDDE) and deploy them at scale: delivering scientific breakthroughs with a precision previously thought impossible, accelerating and expanding our pipeline of therapeutic programs toward the clinic. All with the ultimate goal of delivering life-changing new medicines to patients. Moving forward, we will scale our drug candidate pipelines across multiple therapeutic areas, expand our global footprint, and push the boundaries of frontier AI research to power our drug design engine. Deeply grateful to everyone sharing our vision to solve all disease with AI. Let’s build the future of medicine. Read the full announcement here: bit.ly/4v2OI03

Better outcomes on less compute. Congrats all @prior_labs on an astonishing technical achievement.