Prime Minister announced a new strategy to develop sovereign compute capability earlier today. Includes £400m of spending on "specialist AI chips."

MAFIA EP 001

We just raised a historic funding round for Portugal, backed by some of the country’s top unicorn founders. And we're now looking for the best young talent to join us. So we built something to find them. It's called Arcus - a series of trials. No resume. No application forms. Just a terminal and a problem to solve. The first trial is live: Ode Triunfal, with €3k in prizes. Access it through 'ssh augustalabs[dot]ai'. More info in the comments. We're just getting started.

Bill Gurley: Anthropic Thinks It’s Building God @Jason: It is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God. @bgurley: “Anthropic is a mystery to me. I've never, ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most negatively outspoken commenter on what they do. And my initial theory was the regulatory capture theory. Quite frankly, I think they're very close to achieving that. But then they just got so loud that I've literally, in the past 30 days, read everything I can about Anthropic, and I've come up with a new theory. I call it the Dr. Frankenstein theory. The more I dig, I've met people who, I dare say, think it's their responsibility, and they're excited about, building a species that's superior to humans. Dario wrote this blog post called ‘Machines of Loving Grace.’ It was based on a poem. The last stanza of the poem says, ‘I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors, and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.’ Sounds like an overlord to me. And then in Dario's post, he says, ‘It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans…’ So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing a deity here.” Jason: “These are delusions of grandeur. Let's call it what it is. They believe that they're so powerful, these individuals, that they can create God, and that by creating God, they are like this Prometheus kind of species. It literally is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.”

Ian Hogarth is a legend

A fair challenge, but i think it rests on a category error. The politics of a founder or an executive are not the politics of a company. Palantir’s founders - Karp and Thiel - famously hold opposite political views on many issues. Our employees hold every view in between. Which of them is Palantir’s politics? Or - worse - are we to assume the politics of our customers are ours, simply because we work for them? That every elected government we serve confers its politics on us in turn? Palantir is political, but not in the partisan sense your point implies. Palantir’s politics is a commitment to the West, to liberal democracy, and to the rule of law. That is precisely why neither of the above tests work: the moment a company’s politics is read off the views of its founders or its customers, we have left the world of objective standards and entered one of subjective association - exactly the test the Mayor’s office now proposes for public procurement. Public procurement decisions should rest on objective standards, not subjective tests of “values”. That is a principle I think is worth defending, particularly under pressure.

“He talks about values, but I think what Londoners value is not being mugged, not being raped by a serving police officer.” CEO of Palantir UK Louis Mosley says London Mayor Sadiq Khan is “putting politics over public safety” by blocking the tech firm’s deal with the Met Police.