World Robot Day - 25 January GlobalBritainTechAI

A most valuable hour inside the Pentagon with @Kantrowitz - bookmark! @PidaRipley @warstudies @WarStudiesSoc @RUSI_org @ChathamHouse

Thrilled to announce our investment in Starcloud. From our initial investment to a $1.1B valuation, this extraordinary engineering team continues to make remarkable breakthroughs in power, cooling, and manufacturing. Their technical rigor and ambition is truly exceptional!

I am super excited to share that @Starcloud_ has raised a $170M Series A at a $1.1bn valuation to fuel our development of data centers in space 🚀 The round comes after the successful deployment of our first satellite, Starcould-1, a few months ago, which had the first @NVIDIA H100 on board and was the first to train an LLM in space. The funds will be used to develop our third satellite, which aims to be cost-competitive with Earth-based data centers in terms of AI inference cost. The round was led by @Benchmark and @EQT Ventures, and we are excited to welcome Benchmark GP, @Chetanp Puttagunta, to our board. We are also excited to welcome other new investors, including the world's largest infrastructure fund, @Macquarie Capital, @SevenSevenSix 7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣, Manhattan West, Adjacent, Carya, GSBackers, and Harpoon. We are very grateful for the continued support of existing investors, including @NFX, @NebularVC, @YCombinator, @FUSE_VC, @Soma_Capital, 3Capital Partners, Wyld VC, Tiny VC, and Taurus Ventures. Onwards!

We're thrilled to announce Bret Taylor, Co-Founder & CEO of Sierra, will be joining us at Open House for a fireside chat. Bret co-created Google Maps. He was CTO of Facebook. He co-led Salesforce as Co-CEO. He sits on the board of OpenAI. And now he's building Sierra, redefining how businesses connect with customers through AI. This one's not to be missed. 🔥 Spots are limited. Register today to make sure you're there. clickhou.se/4c4tLtu

We built Video Agent so you can go from a single prompt to a finished video. Now with Seedance 2.0 integrated. One prompt. Your digital twin. Cinematic shots. Motion graphics. A finished video up to 3 minutes long. No separate tools, no extra steps.

We should be more humble in predicting the future as no-one really knows.

Interesting further debate offered via 'The Larynx Problem: Why Large Language Models Are Not Artificial Intelligence' by Björn Wikström, Base76 Research Lab. 'Building intelligence requires building the machinery that generates thought — not optimizing the channel through which thought exits...Alan Turing asked in 1950 whether machines could think. The question was good. The operationalization — imitate linguistic output — measured the wrong thing and led a field. We now know enough to operationalize the question correctly. The destination is still intelligence. The path needs correcting.' Appreciated free download!

incidentally i'm looking for a home for "what we talk to when we talk to language models" (philarchive.org/rec/CHAWWT-8) as well as for "propositional interpretability in artificial intelligence" (arxiv.org/abs/2501.15740). both of them are somewhat long and unwieldy so perhaps not perfect for a standard journal. suggestions are welcome.

In 'What We Talk to When We Talk to Language Models' David J. Chalmer firstly addresses 'some issues in the philosophy of mind, about how best to characterize the interlocutor as a potential subject of mental states in reasonably neutral terms. Is the interlocutor conscious? Does it have beliefs and desires? Is it at least interpretable as having beliefs and desires?' A generous free download of a thought provoking article. Appreciated.

AI in robotics gets all the attention right now, but sometimes the most interesting work is very practical. Viet built a small vision system that counts potatoes on a conveyor belt. No giant dataset. No huge model. Just a clear problem and a smart setup. He used Ultralytics’ ObjectCounter, trained a tiny YOLO11 nano model, and because there was no potato dataset, he annotated a single frame with SAM 2 and trained from that. One frame. Still works across the whole video. It is a good reminder that useful AI in industry often looks like this. Focused. Lightweight. Solves a real task. If you work in manufacturing or robotics, these small systems are usually the fastest wins. They save time, reduce errors, and do not need massive infrastructure. Nice work, Viet. His projects: github.com/vietnh1009 —- Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free: scalingdeep.tech

Download the full report: imf.org/en/publication…

WATCH LIVE: The launch of our latest Global Financial Stability Report: Global Financial Markets Confront the War in the Middle East and Amplification Risks: x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

The Archbishop of Washington D.C. just said it directly. “In Catholic teaching, this is not a just war.” This isn’t a foreign pope making diplomatic statements from Rome. This is the Archbishop of the American capital. The man who leads the Catholic Church in the city where the war was decided, where Congress was gaveled into silence, where the Pentagon threatened the Vatican’s ambassador for daring to disagree. He just told Washington — from Washington — that what they are doing fails the moral test their own faith demands. The just war doctrine has four criteria. A just cause. Right intention. Last resort. Proportional means. Cardinal McElroy is saying this war fails them. He joins Pope Leo XIV who called it unjust. Who called Trump’s threats unacceptable. Who the Pentagon summoned and threatened with the Avignon Papacy for saying so. They threatened the Pope. They didn’t silence him. They can’t silence the Archbishop either.

BREAKING : Italian 🇮🇹 Georgia Meloni becomes the first PM in the world to belt Trump for his remarks on Pope 🔥 🇺🇸 Trump –– "The Pope is weak against crime and he is not doing his job well. He is terrible for foreign policy" 🇮🇹 Meloni –– 🔥 "Trump's words toward the Holy Father are unacceptable. The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church and it is right and normal for him to call for peace and to condemn every form of war" Trump expected support at Strait of Hormuz from Meloni but she's exposing his hypocrisy instead 🤣

Demis Hassabis just described the moment medicine stops treating disease and starts deleting it from the source code. For all of human history, doctors have fought symptoms. The tumor. The organ failure. The collapse. Always downstream. Always after the damage has already started. The cause sits upstream. Written into the DNA. Ninety-eight percent of the human genome sits in non-coding regions. For decades, science understood the genes but couldn’t read the vast dark territory between them. That’s where most disease hides. Hassabis: “It takes the big, long genetic sequences and then it tries to predict, if you made a mutation to this particular single letter, single position in the genetic sequence, will that be a harmful mutation that might cause disease, or is it benign?” AlphaGenome reads your entire genetic sequence and identifies the exact letter that’s corrupted. Not a region. Not a probability range. A single position in a three-billion-letter sequence. That alone would be a generational breakthrough. But most diseases aren’t that clean. Hassabis: “What if they’re multigenic diseases where there’s cascades of mutations causing the problem? Those are even harder to detect, but actually perfect for sort of AI.” One mutation is hard enough to find. A cascade of mutations interacting across the genome is a problem no human researcher can hold in their head at once. Three billion data points. Compounding errors across all of them. The human brain cannot solve that. AI doesn’t solve it either. It maps it. All of it. At once. The most devastating diseases on Earth. The ones medicine has called untreatable for generations. They are not mysteries to the algorithm. They’re compute problems. But finding the error was only ever half the equation. You also need the ability to fix it. That tool already exists. CRISPR is a molecular scalpel. It cuts DNA at exact positions. The limitation was never the editing. It was knowing exactly where to cut. Hassabis: “A kind of combination of things like AlphaGenome and CRISPR could be incredibly powerful.” AI reads the code. CRISPR rewrites it. One finds the mutation. The other corrects it at the source. Not managing symptoms. Not slowing progression. Deleting the error from the genome. The implications go beyond treatment. A disease corrected at the genetic level doesn’t just disappear from one patient. It disappears from their bloodline. The read access is here. The write access exists. The merge is inevitable. The era of accepting a broken genetic hand is ending. We stopped being passengers in our own biology.

The CEO of the AI company running the US military just told the world the American education system is training children for jobs that will not exist. Alex Karp is describing a transformation already happening inside the companies he works with every single day. Karp said the costs of what is coming are going to be very high, and that America needs to stop pretending otherwise and start making brutally honest decisions about how it trains its people. Here is what he is actually saying when you strip away the pleasantries. AI is going to eliminate entire categories of white-collar employment that took decades of elite education to enter. A US Senate report already placed the estimated job destruction figure at nearly 100 million American jobs within the next decade. And the workers being targeted first are not factory workers or truck drivers. They are humanities graduates, lawyers, junior analysts, and the college educated professional class that has defined economic status in America for the last fifty years. Then he named the only two categories of people he believes have a genuinely secure economic future in the age of AI. The first group is people with vocational training, electricians, technicians, and skilled tradespeople whose hands-on expertise cannot be automated away while the rest of the economy gets restructured around software. The second group is the neurodivergent. His argument is that people who think differently, who see around corners, who process the world at an angle the standard curriculum was never designed to accommodate, those are exactly the people AI cannot easily replace. Then he said something that should stop every parent in America cold. Right now, when a neurodivergent kid sits down in a high school classroom, the system does not nurture that unconventional intelligence. The system chains them to a chair and medicates them into conformity so they can perform skills that AI is already rendering obsolete. America is pharmacologically optimizing its most cognitively valuable citizens out of their competitive advantage. Karp also argued that AI will make large-scale immigration economically unnecessary, because AI-powered domestic productivity will fill the gaps that mass migration was previously needed to address. He said these disruptions will reduce the economic power of college-educated voters while increasing the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class voters.

An increasingly coherent picture of the impact of AI on jobs, by @jburnmurdoch @ft: 1. New Fed paper by Crane and Soto now confirms with official labor force survey data what private payroll analysis was showing: roughly 500,000 fewer coders are working than pre-LLM trends would predict. 2. Argues evidence consistent with my work (with Lin and Wu, link in my pinned post) on weak/strong bundles: junior developers and contractors hold "weak bundles" (their work is mostly standalone coding that AI can substitute directly), senior developers hold "tight bundles" where coding is combined with domain expertise, judgment, and cross-functional responsibilities, making substitution much harder. 3. Freund & Mann and Gans & Goldfarb add a second lens: what matters is the value of the tasks that survive automation. Remove coding from a senior role and you free up time for higher-value work; remove it from a junior role and almost nothing remains. ft.com/content/b69f85…

中国公司 BrainCo 推出了 Revo 3，这是一款具有更高自由度和精确度的灵巧机器人手。 创始人：韩璧丞（哈佛大学脑科学中心博士） 公司研发起源在美国波士顿，全球总部在中国杭州 2026 年初完成约20 亿元人民币融资，为中国脑机接口领域单笔最高纪录，全球仅次于 Neuralink（马斯克）。

The amazing brain - the core reason why humans must NOT hand over controls to the #AI future.

What an incredible year—huge thanks to Storyful Looking ahead to 2026 👇 • TEDx talk release • Podcast interviews (incl @A4MEvents) • Judging • Publishing (author & editor) • Producing (TBA) • Longevity consulting, advisory boards & more fun Grateful for all the support🙏