My humble contribution to the inflation discourse:

I suspect this is an example of precisely the dynamic that @KelseyTuoc described last year in a great piece about the UC San Diego report. It is genuinely not an easy situation for a teacher. theargumentmag.com/p/when-gr…

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! 🇬🇧

The world has warmed by around 1.4C since 1850. It took 148 years for the first half of that warming to occur, and just 27 years for the second half!

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

*Taps the sign*

This is the strongest case I’ve seen for scholar activism, even for someone that is usually not sympathetic to it. Excellent reading.

Does this mean telling people what Carnap would have thought about AI?

The nerfing of Claude Fable for AI work makes sense under a certain logic, but, a) hiding it from the user b) disclosing it in the model card seems like the worst possible combination. Why not disclose it? Is the worry that people will try to prompt hack to do it anyway?

Truly the most American story, back on Twitter and posting feel good AI slop and boosting crypto.

As always, companies with a Chief {Current Thing} Officer are NGMI. 2026: AI 2018: Blockchain 2015: Data 2013: Digital Transformation 2005: Innovation 1999: Internet

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease. This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit. The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London. A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box. These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel. They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains. They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep. Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”: > “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.” — The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates. It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption. SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins). The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill. With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment. Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two. It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place. All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now. That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective. If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

To add to what Ben said, a fun fact. I learned Classical Mechanics on Arnold’s classic text. The book is amazingly sketchy when it comes to proofs! And it’s full of pictures. But it’s correct. You can fill the epsilons and deltas and add measure theory on your own. If this level of detail is good for Arnold, it ought to be good for economists. I’ll add an inflammatory statement. If you feel you can’t convey the ideas of your (economics, physics, etc) paper without invoking a probability triple and a filtration, either you have expository issues, or your ideas are not deep enough, since they rely on very technical results. There are exceptions, of course.

Politics and Science as Vocations were talks that absolutely drew a bright line between politics and science. I’m so confused by this. Have you read Weber??

The data forensics report in the Francesca Gino v. Harvard lawsuit is an eye-opening read on how experts can document file manipulations.

Me when I see non-standard notation in a paper: youtu.be/Jln3mi0vfJU?si=i5PK…