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 changes everything.

回顾“俄式民主” 士兵还可以进去看看选民选的对不对，很贴心的服务！

Why, it's almost as if he isn't serious about ending the war....

A network of Chinese companies has tried to buy properties in Finland that are critical to national security. Attempts have been made to purchase properties in locations important to security of supply arrangements, critical infrastructure, or national defence logistics. The Ministry of Defence has intervened and blocked the attempts. Before, Russia has sought to acquire security-critical properties in Finland. Now, for the first time, Chinese parties have attempted the same. 1/2

All those podcasters you half jokingly said are probably paid by Russia are now literally having a meet up in Moscow

Red Alert 2, Master of Olympus: Zeus, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Age of Empires II

RT @PhillipsPOBrien: The US is bankrolling Iran…so much winning!

Holy Father the post will perform better if you append the url in a threaded reply as opposed to linking it in the tweet

Gemini continues to be the most fascinating model

Ambassadors @villecantell of Finland, @jennyhillcanada of Canada, Clarissa Duvigneau of Germany and Jónas Allansson DG of Iceland’s Defense Directorate discuss the role of middle powers with @RUVfrettir’s Ingólfur Bjarni at ACONA conference.

Wow! Leaks to the NYT claiming Trump didn’t cancel the strikes due to UAE and Qatari requests but due to the Pentagon! Claiming Iran is becoming effective at tracking US air operations and using air defences. Hugely embarrassing and likely means aggression won’t bring them to the table!

The weekend was spent discussing hybrid and drones at #LennartMeriConference. Very poignant timing.

First ever air-to-air interception shootdown of drone over Estonia by NATO air policing just now delfi.ee/artikkel/120584829/…

This is a tremendous essay: “And perhaps this is why adult friendship feels increasingly radical. It resists the transactional logic modern life rewards everywhere else. Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence.” timesofindia.indiatimes.com/…

For the first time, Ukraine has managed to hit the Moscow oil refinery, the most protected facility in the country - multiple strikes.

Iceland missing.