Dave Lee

Everything tagged #uk

Another UK department abandons X/Twitter. It’s the right decision but a sad one: There was a time when government ministers joining Twitter was a win for accountability. Now these figures must leave in the name of decency.

Lisa Nandy removing herself and DCMS from Twitter would have been unthinkable a few years ago but honestly the only mad thing is that it hasn’t happened sooner. And now it’s pretty hard for a future… | Jim Waterson | 49 commentslnkd.inLisa Nandy removing herself and DCMS from Twitter would have been unthinkable a few years ago but honestly the only mad thing is that it hasn’t happened sooner. And now it’s pretty hard for a future DCMS secretary to actively reinstate the department. Plus it’s a question for every other minister now. Westminster and journalism still runs on X but honestly if there was a mass migration elsewhere (to, idk, platforms where the general public consume stuff) it would probably be healthier for society. And if you’re a reporter worried from a journalism perspective, since I stopped consuming and mentally writing for Twitter I’ve massively increased my audience. | 49 comments on LinkedIn

politicsukxtwitterlisa nandyjim waterson

What role for Britain in the AI revolution? Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s minister for AI and Online Safety, does a great job outlining both the country's vulnerability — no frontier LLMs to call its own — and its strength: more than a century of computing and AI innovation. Speaking to the Financial Times:

I think that the diagnosis has to be that we are not in a terrific position from a strategic leverage point of view. The frontier models are developed either in the United States or slightly behind them by a few months in China. And so Britain does not have companies when it comes to frontier language models, and we don’t have the core chip architecture, the Nvidia chips, as well as the memory and packaging.

So SK Hynix in South Korea, for example, gives them an advantage. TSMC in Taiwan gives them an advantage. ASML in Netherlands gives them an advantage. And so broadly speaking, we have some strengths in that supply chain, but none of those you would point to. Arm does a lot of the chip design, but none of those you’d really point to and say Britain is currently competing sufficiently with the United States and China so that we can have continued access to critical inputs.

And so the nature of the problem is very stark, and I think it’s a serious question for the future of our economic and national security. And so what do you do about it? And there are two ways I think about this. Broadly, what you’re trying to do is have, without the pun, chips on the table so that you can access others as critical inputs.

And you can do that either by having chips on the table in the AI stack, or you can also think about it as a broader international negotiation bundle. We might not just offer AI things, we might offer other things that are important to, say, the United States or to China to be able to secure access. On AI, what we’re trying to do is effectively say we think it’s really critical we build more leverage, and that’s why we are focused on things that give us leverage.

We think our chip companies will, if they succeed, be in a position where it’s very hard to replace them in some cases, and that gives you leverage. We think some of the frontier models that we’re developing outside of language in materials discovery, in new drugs discovery, in world models and vision models, we think those will give us leverage. But those are not overnight things, and they take a little bit of time.

And the third thing is, we have built pretty remarkable state capacity. We have built the AI Security Institute, which is the only lab in the world that gets pre-deployment access to all the core models. And so by understanding the risks, sharing it in a trusted way with core allies across the Five Eyes, we think we’re able to build trust that also gives us leverage in the AI stack as well.

And so my focus across the AI stack, both on hardware, on models, and at the heart of it on governance assurance, on safety, on state capacity, is to try and build things that serve British interests domestically as well as internationally.

Transcript: How to win at AI (if you’re not the US or China), with AI minister Kanishka Narayanft.comSoumaya Keynes speaks to Kanishka Narayan

aipoliticsukfinancial timeskanishka narayan

We were either too racist or not racist enough.

I saw all Reform’s weaknesses on display in Makerfield – Farage should be worried | John Harristheguardian.comFrom a hopeless candidate to botched strategy, this latest byelection defeat is telling. But for Labour, there is still a long and arduous journey ahead, says Guardian columnist John Harris

politicsukreformkeir starmerandy burnhamthe guardian

No society to defend

There are some things that have to be above politics. If there are not, then we have no society to defend.

-- Tory MP Geoffrey Cox in this remarkable speech to the House opposing the Labour Party's plan to abolish trial by jury for some cases, including for some serious offenses.

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