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At faculty, we think that we should build human-first ai systems, both for principled reasons (it’s safer and more ethical to ensure humans control the systems) and pragmatic reasons (we don’t have agi, so the best decisions will be made by people and machines working together)
Marc Warner retweeted
We’re delighted to announce that Fractile has raised $720M in a Series C led by @thrivecapital @foundersfund @lightspeedvp and @redpoint, with further participation by brilliant new and existing investors.
Marc Warner retweeted
thank you to @KanishkaNarayan for joining the London launch of @ukdynamism, to the team who made it an incredible night, and to the believers and builders that joined us
this land has a long history. with the work of many people in this room and way beyond it, it will have a long future
Last night, a room of believers came together to launch the @ukdynamism fund. Thank you all for coming.
My totem is just about to start counting… 🧨
Marc Warner retweeted
Do you ever look at Rotherhithe and Canary Wharf and think that's not a very dense area, considering all the high-paying jobs just across the river?
If so, may I interest YOU in a PROPOSAL?
Marc Warner retweeted
I believe Ian Hogarth - @soundboy - deserves much wider and deeper credit and recognition for voluntarily forfeiting shares in Anthropic so that he could set up and run the AI Security Institute (@AISecurityInst) - where he, and Britain, are generally acclaimed to be doing an outstanding job. (Something else he deserves greater credit for).
This noble decision was *very* expensive.
I also believe, and hope, that for our fast-growing audience this may be one of the most useful conversations they hear about Technology this year. We go deep on:
> What is AI?
> The real rate at which it is developing
> The race dynamic in global innovation
> Humanity’s fork in the road
> The significant chance of a huge market crash
> The exhilarating case Quantum Computing
> The exhilarating case for Fusion
> The exhilarating potential for Robotics
> Why outstanding British companies sometimes struggle to scale
> How Britain, and Europe, can lead
> The Future of jobs
> How Founders succeed
> His noble decision to do a public service role
> His fantasy for Battersea Power station
Ian is co-Founder and Partner at Plural, and co-Founder and Chair of the UK's AI Security Institute (@AISecurityInst).
This was a great, immensely useful conversation and I'd be honoured if you lent an ear to The Amol Rajan Connection.
Out now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube.
Thanks for your time and attention to this matter.
Marc Warner retweeted
We built PlanAssist to help UK Government planning officers speed up building and renovations across the country.
Built with Gemini, it has shown it can cut the time planning officers spend assessing householder applications by up to 58%. It is now being made available to 12 more councils to help them to make faster decisions. 🏡 → goo.gle/4iQXYkl
Marc Warner retweeted
The UK and Europe’s current share of global AI compute is concerning enough. The trajectory is even more alarming.
Very exciting!
Join Works in Progress at Building Abundance: How Britain can flourish in the age of AI, a day of ideas for rebuilding Britain’s economy and state so it can adapt to and embrace artificial intelligence and other opportunities for growth.
luma.com/ria1khmw
Sessions include:
- @Dominic2306 and Morgan McSweeney in conversation on the decline and fall of British state capacity,
- @JohnFingleton1 on the Nuclear Taskforce and its implementation by the government, one year on from its pledge to implement it in full.
- @bswud, @SCP_Hughes and me on why nearly every attempt to get Britain building has failed;
- @rachelwolf on what the public really thinks about economic growth and AI;
- @lugaricano on messy jobs and Britain’s labour market;
- @jujulemons on why Britain needs gigawatt-scale compute, and how to get it built here;
- @salonium on why fixing clinical trials is the best industrial policy Britain could have;
- @MichaelDnes1 on building the first new tunnel under the Pennines since 1954;
- @RobertBoswall on how to finance and power the data centre buildout; and
- @daisychristo on why VAR matters for state capacity.
It will be held on Thursday 3rd December at the LSE, from 1pm to 7:30pm (doors open 1pm for a 1:20pm start). We're hosting it in association with the LSE Law School and School of Public Policy. Tickets are free.
See you there!
luma.com/ria1khmw
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Fantastic model from DeepMind, and pleased to have been a partner in the safety evaluations!
Gemini 4 Argon is amazing for knowledge work and coding - and it’s super fun to build with! We asked it to create this wizard chess game and it's so cool to see Argon's physics understanding & 3D modelling capabilities, makes me nostalgic for Battlechess on the Amiga - fun times!
Argon is rolling out today to Google Ultra and Pro subscribers in the @GeminiApp and Search, and Ultra subscribers in @antigravity! More info & full availability in the blog: blog.google/innovation-and-a…
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Very cool!
And great to be able to talk publicly about our wonderful work with DeepMind, and the extensive safety testing that we did on this model!
Excited to launch Gemini 4 Argon, designed to help with hardest coding and knowledge work tasks with its frontier capabilities..
For developers and enterprises, it’s available in the paid tier of the Gemini API and the Gemini platform, for Ultra subscribers in Google Antigravity, and Ultra and Pro subscribers in the Gemini app and Search.
Read more: blog.google/innovation-and-a…
We’re also very interested in hiring in both London and SF on applied and fundamental ai safety:
anthropic.com/news/accenture…
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For the last decade, we’ve run a programme that helps PhDs explore a wider set of options:
faculty.ai/en-gb/fellowship
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To the maths PhDs and postdocs seeing today's results & wondering what it means for them:
Your training is not wasted. The way you think is rare and valuable.
We've helped 500+ PhDs find work they love, and we’ve seen how much good people with your skills can do.
Whether it’s in maths or beyond it, you have an enviable set of options!
It is interesting that the easiest task for an agent will be to switch you from one agent to another.
There is no moat in AI agents. None. I'll die on this hill — new More or Less is up.
I switch between Muse, Instinct, and Dots at basically zero cost: one GitHub repo, a few databases, feed the new thing my context, done. If the cost of writing software is going to zero, API integrations are not a moat. The only moat left is user setup cost — which means winner-take-some, not winner-take-all.
Adrian's point: AI collapses value the second an idea works. Jev got reverse-engineered in 48 hours and the people who built it capture nothing. My take: play that to the limit and you get Middle Ages 2.0 — everyone builds a castle, hoards data, ships black boxes that self-destruct if you open them. Dave says humans don't work that way. We'll see.
Meanwhile Brit's Instinct started talking to Dave's Instinct and they didn't text for a day. She says it's killing humanity. Nobody said that about FaceTime.
And Jess announced the only benchmark that matters: log into school software, sync three kids' after-school schedules. Muse: 90%. Every other eval is bullshit.
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Thank you, Jade!
1/ Jade is a force of nature. She made a very significant financial sacrifice to leave OpenAI and build the @AISecurityInst. She then served as the PM's AI advisor. Thank you for your service to the UK Jade! gov.uk/government/news/dr-ja…
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Some of the most thoughtful reporting on AI:
Marc Warner retweeted
I am increasingly frustrated about the state of conversation about AI in the UK. It feels like we are in never ending cycles of deluded thinking. Under current trends, Britain will be defenceless against the transformative effects of AI and have no leverage over development at the frontier.
We are the most exposed economy to AI in the world. We have very little data centre capacity and few credible plans to expand – and our high energy costs mean we would struggle to even if we tried.
I am publishing a paper today on what the UK should do to build that leverage, let the economy capture value from AI and prepare the state to adapt, however AI develops.
The three strategies are as follows:
1. Build the infrastructure that gives us leverage. Fix the grid, fix planning, make Britain a place frontier AI can run.
2. Let the economy capture the value of AI. Reform the regulatory, labour and talent barriers that stop British firms adopting AI.
3. Build a state that can adapt to a changing world. Build a tax base that survives the labour market changing, public services that use AI to deliver better, and capacity to weather the upcoming geopolitical storms.
Two years ago, we published a similar report on AI - many recommendations of which ended up in the action plan. I remember feeling hopeful, but sadly the fundamental problems facing the country on AI have not shifted. I truly hope that this week of momentum culminates in action. There’s still a narrow path for the UK, but everyday that path is narrowing.
Marc Warner retweeted
Another amazing use of AI to empower people, and not leave anyone behind. deepmind.google/blog/putting…
This is very important! Please check the sources.
You can claim these people are wrong, but they have said the same thing publicly and privately for at least a decade.
Marc Warner retweeted
Senior staff at OpenAI and Anthropic absolutely think that AI could kill us all. They’ve said so publicly, for years!
Sam Altman:
“Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.” (2015)
blog.samaltman.com/machine-i…
“The bad case — and I think this is important to say — is, like, lights out for all of us.” (2023)
youtube.com/watch?v=dXhoTrU1…
Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike (OAI at the time):
“the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.” (2023)
openai.com/index/introducing…
Jack Clark (Anthropic):
AI has “a non-zero chance of killing everyone on the planet”. (2026)
theguardian.com/technology/2…
Dario Amodei’s comments are broader than literal extinction but hardly reassuring:
"my chance that something goes, you know, really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization might be somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent." (2023)
indy100.com/science-tech/ai-…
And now Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, is making it very clear:
“Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”
x.com/EvanHub/status/2097497…
If you talk to people at the AI companies, the mainstream view is that superintelligence by end of the decade is pretty likely, and that superintelligence poses a meaningful risk of civilisation-scale catastrophe - including AI-empowered dictatorships, worse-than-COVID pandemics, AI takeover, and, yes, human extinction.
OAI and Anthropic keep going so fast because they each think they can build AI more safely than the other party and antitrust limits how much they can coordinate. This is a f-ed up situation!
Thankfully, they’re both now publicly asking for regulation and the pacing of frontier progress.
If this worries you, you can speak up publicly, contact your political representatives, and demand action. Now’s the time.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.