Tom Westgarth

Sovereign AI AIRR launch opportunity: call for researchers

Are you a UK AI academic that wants to be GPU rich this summer?

The Sovereign AI Unit has a call out for high ambition proposals in our core priority areas.

Apply by July 7th! www.gov.uk/government/p...

Join the UK Progress Idea Machine Momentum is building around a new movement trying to revive the UK. We describe who they are, what is missing, and how you can help.

This from @tomwestgarth.bsky.social on the emerging "progress" scene makes for interesting reading – and includes a mention of our podcast!

tomwestgarth.substack.com/p/join-the-u...

TxP: The UK Progress Idea Machine · Luma Join us at Wayve for a showcase of organisations working to unlock UK progress! Momentum is growing amongst a community of ambitious young folks in the UK.…

There is a growing community dedicated to unlocking U.K. progress and abundance.

Come to the next TxP to hear from organisations such as ARIA, Centre for British Progress, Nucleate, Inference Magazine, Digital Frontier, and Project Europe!
lu.ma/fuf590zb?loc...

New executive chair selected to boost innovation and growth across the UK Tom Adeyoola selected as preferred candidate to head up Innovate UK.

Super appointment.

It’s great to see so many people from the startup world going into public service!
www.gov.uk/government/n...

This prompts an interesting discussion about how these tools may soon be cultural artifacts.

Things like BBC historical video archives aren’t just great for understanding evolving values, but changing production techniques etc. Will compute costs eat these cultural phenomena?

TxP & Restless Egg | Art Made AI: Demos, Discussion, DJs · Luma On Fri 31st Jan, TxP x Restless Egg present Art Made AI: Going beyond the zero-sum lens of copyright/IP debates, Art Made AI will unpack how art is a space for…

The next TxP will explode art as a space for AI R&D.

Panellists include Mat Dryhurst, Flora Weil, and Will Fraudenheim!

lu.ma/ff7rj1z5?loc...

bernie sanders is wearing a jacket and glasses and says `` i am once again asking '' ALT: bernie sanders is wearing a jacket and glasses and says `` i am once again asking ''

Wondering if there are any DJs (especially female/non-binary DJs) in my tech policy network that would be interested in spinning some plates at the next TxP event. 🎧 🎶

Dm me if interested!

One of my favourite public speakers making such elegant observations about one of my favourite films.

Silicon Valley’s Civil War Tech’s leadership is splitting into two elites—and the battle between them will shape America’s future

Fwiw Nadia Asparouhova wrote a brilliant essay on these tech counter elites back in May 2023.

Framed it in a much more incisive way than Gray imo
www.tabletmag.com/sections/new...

I’d love for the BBC to commission Hannah Fry to do a 6 part series on AI in 2025.

She’s such an incredible science communicator, and now is the time for a big public dialogue on the technology.

And ultimately much of the work we wrote about is attempting to break away from a model of R&D that is hierarchical and target-driven.

First sc from NNP biotech, second sc from the first NNP

Look forward to it - hope you’re having a good holiday break!

There’s also a lot of debate over what this means for the impact of export controls.

Not sure where I sit on that one but it is really phenomenal that a team out of a hedge fund is genuinely competing with tech giants at 1% of the cost github.com/deepseek-ai/...

So Chinese company Deepseek released their latest frontier grade LLM.

Some astounding context worth repeating:
-They only used 2000 GPUs on a budget of around $6m. This level of capability requires normally around a 16k GPU cluster
-Deepseek is literally a project ran by a Chinese hedge fund!

It would also be great to know what you think is Thatcher 3.0 exactly about the capital markets paper?

These seem to be critically motivated by scaling UK companies, + using mechanisms like advanced market commitments/shutting down AIM is definitely not the default posture of the s&t establishment!

This applied metascience philosophy is a central core to the NNP, and certainly did not feature heavily at all in the 1980s period of science policy that you describe.

And ultimately much of the work we wrote about is attempting to break away from a model of R&D that is hierarchical and target-driven.

First sc from NNP biotech, second sc from the first NNP

I guess I still am not sure what you really mean by 'near market'. The TBI advocates plenty of work that is trying to take foundational research+apply it to the market (e.g. Lab of Biodesign proposal in NNP biotech)

Then there's other work that strongly steers pvt sector investment (e.g. pensions)

Let me go to the football, have a think on this later, and will get back to you with a response!

So just so I understand your point, are you suggesting that the TBIs work in this space that does call for govt intervention is only early stage R&D (hence term “pre market”), and therefore is just more of the same?

Accelerating the Future: Industrial Strategy in the Era of AI Accelerating the Future: Industrial Strategy in the Era of AI

institute.global/insights/eco...

Sad that he missed out reading our pieces on industrial strategy and on how to keep more S&T companies in the U.K., before he wrote two entire essays saying “TBI doesn’t say anything on industrial strategy or how to keep more S&T companies in the U.K.”!

institute.global/insights/eco...

o3: The grand finale of AI in 2024 A step change as influential as the release of GPT-4. Reasoning language models are the current big thing.

Excellent post about the recent OpenAI o3 results on ARC (& other benchmarks). I don't know how @natolambert.bsky.social manages to write these so quickly! I highly recommend his newsletter.

www.interconnects.ai/p/openais-o3...

I am (more slowly) writing my own take on all this, coming soon.

Great discussion including @pahlkadot.bsky.social and @andrewgreenway.bsky.social on success stories in state capacity in the U.K.

One for the Bluesky Heads ™️ I think open.substack.com/pub/statecra...

I'd also add one other important difference - which is assumptions around capabilities.

Acemoglu assumes that AI will not improve much beyond GPT-4, and crucially, that AI systems will not be integrated into robotics... cepr.org/voxeu/column...

Why is there a lot of disagreement amongst economists about AI productivity forecasts?

This article suggests differences in assumptions around speed of adoption, and if this adoption is concentrated to a small number of sectors.

I would greatly appreciate submissions and shares of this, to help us motivate funders to support open source toolmaking for academic science. 🙏

#neuroskyence #neuroscience #neuroai #chemsky #compchem #compbio #hpc #machinelearning #ai

Exciting initiative. Two relevant points:

1.) Gaps in tooling are seen as a key blocker to improved capabilities + adoption.
2.) Another example of philanthropic orgs backing AI for R&D.

This looks v interesting. The diffusion of technology is often constrained by poor software tools.

An under-explored policy question is how to create the right conditions/incentives for quality tools to be developed and scaled.