Built 2x biz from start-up to sale. Interested in AI, politics and dispute resolution. LFG.
Winchester, UK
Joined November 2008
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This is the thread where I took a deep dive into the Next plc equal pay judgements, which informed some of @atabarrok's post on Marginal Revolution here:
marginalrevolution.com/margi…
How does a court decide that those Next warehouse jobs involve work of equal value (actually lower value, as we will see later) to the Next retail jobs?
A 🧵
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Bruce Greig retweeted
I have a major result to share.
I’ve found conclusive forensic evidence that the top 4 Chinese AI labs—DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax and Ant Group—have built their newest models on NVIDIA’s most advanced Blackwell chips, which are barred from export to China.
This sounds insane, but I discovered that almost every AI model carries a hidden signature of the GPU that trained it. When a model is first set up, the starting values of its weights are laid out in a pattern that depends on the exact GPU. Each combination of GPU and seed number produces a unique pattern—a sort of fingerprint of the hardware used to create the model. Traces of that pattern survive training into the published model.
Again, this evidence isn’t based on any insider information or leaking. It’s based on a forensic analysis of the model weights released by the companies themselves.
I searched more than six trillion combinations of chip layout and seed number and matched them to open-weights models. In doing so, I found conclusive evidence that six Chinese AI models—including DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K3, and MiniMax-M3—were initialized on NVIDIA Blackwell systems. Four of the models match Grace Blackwell, the GB200 and GB300 parts in NVIDIA’s flagship liquid-cooled rack-scale systems.
I then verified these results on real hardware. Running unmodified PyTorch with the seeds I’d recovered, a Blackwell B300 reproduced DeepSeek-V4-Flash’s untouched starting weights bit for bit, and a rented GB200 reproduced Kimi K3’s to a correlation of 0.999995. A Hopper H100 reproduced none of DeepSeek-V4-Flash’s, and changing the seed by one broke the match. (DeepSeek’s seed is 953049583 by the way.) The method also was verified to match 24 known open-weights models to the hardware that developers said they used.
It is exceedingly unlikely that these results are a coincidence. Across six trillion combinations, the best accidental match should reach only about 8 sigma (i.e., eight standard deviations above what random chance would produce). The real matches range from 49 to 1,385 sigma, and even the weakest single test hits 20.
These were data-center-scale training runs. With some analysis of release schedules and model details, I estimate that the largest, Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Pro, used 2,000 to 3,000 Blackwell GPUs each. Clusters of this size cost on the order of $150 to $200 million each to buy, and across these labs alone would add up to more than half a billion dollars of export-controlled GPUs, not counting experimental compute or otherwise. It’s quite likely that we see multi-billion dollar expenditure on export-controlled GPUs.
I am highly confident in this result, and it has been independently verified by senior researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic. You can read the full report at unemploymentlabs.com/checkpo….
There is much more I’ve identified about these models through other forms of checkpoint forensics like this, and will have more to share soon.
“Who is responsible for the bread supply in London?” - visiting Soviet official, 1989
AI is engineered to be an essential. It’s being baked into our life & our work. We are going to rely on it with little choice to opt out individually. That’s one of the reasons why AI belongs under public control. Whoever controls the essentials has control over our society and economy. In a democracy that control belongs to the people.
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"We want to approximate teleportation."
Today, Zipline raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation.
When we started Zipline, flying autonomously in the US was illegal. Which made it really hard to convince investors to give us money! But we were too naive to think that meant we shouldn’t try.
We started the company on a cow farm. We worked out of run-down construction trailers so that we could keep engineering, manufacturing, and flight test all unified and in one place. Hiring people from normal companies like Google was hard because we didn’t have a cafe or laundry service. But enough risk takers and rebels wanted to go on an insane adventure with us. They became the early team.
We decided to launch in smaller countries and focus on life-saving use cases. We hired incredible entrepreneurs and operators in Rwanda, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, and other countries. For eight years, Zipline expanded our service across Africa, serving thousands of hospitals and health facilities and reducing maternal mortality by 51%. Today, the network saves over 14k lives every year and is cash flow positive.
Last year, Zipline launched at scale in the US and the service exploded. We grew flight volumes about 100x over the last 18 months, and now make more than a million deliveries a year per metro. We’re now expanding with our partners to millions of deliveries per day. Normal families love having access to anything they need in 10-20 minutes, no matter where they live. Spend more time with loved ones and less time worrying about errands.
Zipline builds drone delivery that is silent and safe. No one wants to hear an extremely loud “swarm of bees” delivering to their backyard or their neighbor’s. Automated delivery needs to be insanely quiet, which guided the overall architecture of our technology delivering from 330 ft in the air. We are 6 times quieter than the closest competitor during delivery. Zipline also now has over 150m commercial autonomous miles (10x the rest of the industry combined) and no safety incidents. Neighborhoods should demand silent and safe delivery!
Today, Zipline is announcing two things. First, we just signed the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history to expand automated delivery nationally with Walmart, our first and biggest partner in the US. We’re starting by scaling to 300 supercenters throughout the country. Second, we’ve raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation from existing and new investors, led by Paradigm, WCM, and Layer.
Zipline was a hard company to believe in for the first ten years of our history. Investors didn’t think the company was “investable”. Most people didn’t even think Zipline was an economic venture. Thanks to those who have rooted for us along the way. To all of the tens of millions of customers and families who rely on Zipline day in and day out: thank you for helping us build the future. Zipline has grown more than @ryanzip, @keenanwyrobek, I, and all others at the company could have imagined.
There is a big opportunity to build a new layer of infrastructure for humanity over the coming years. We want to approximate teleportation. We can build a logistics network that connects and serves all people on earth. We can free human flourishing from the choking constraint of traffic and roads. There are no roads where we’re going. 🚀🌎
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This will clearly be a net saving, not a cost. If everyone exchanges invoices electronically, that saves far more admin time than the £20/month Xero sub which you should have anyway. But it is a collective action problem, which government can solve. Support.
Next little small business additional cost - no document invoices on email from 2029.
All have to be digital through software that speaks to other software.
gov.uk/government/publicatio…
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Bruce Greig retweeted
The year is 1854. Cholera is killing thousands in London. John Snow traces an outbreak to a contaminated water pump. Everyone blames bad air. Eventually cities separate sewage from drinking water. Clean water and sanitation will save more lives than almost anything medicine invents.
The year is 1867. Surgery is often more dangerous than the disease it treats. Joseph Lister starts cleaning instruments and wounds with antiseptic. Other surgeons ridicule him. Infections plummet.
The year is 1890. Your daughter has diphtheria. A thick membrane is forming in her throat, slowly suffocating her. The doctor injects a new antitoxin. She survives. A disease that killed tens of thousands of children will become almost unheard of in America.
The year is 1922. Your 14-year-old son has diabetes. He is starving to death no matter how much he eats. The only treatment is a starvation diet. The doctor injects insulin. His blood sugar falls. Children who would have died within months will grow up and have children.
The year is 1943. Your daughter has pneumonia. Before antibiotics, doctors could do little but hope. Now they give her penicillin. The fever breaks. Infections that routinely killed healthy adults become treatable.
The year is 1955. Parents are terrified of polio. Swimming pools close. Children become paralyzed. Some spend their lives in iron lungs. Jonas Salk develops a vaccine, tested in more than a million children. Within decades, polio disappears from America.
The year is 1960. Your wife is giving birth, and something goes wrong. A century earlier, she might have died. Now there are blood transfusions, antibiotics, safer cesarean sections, and anesthesia. Maternal mortality has fallen dramatically. Millions of women survive childbirth who otherwise wouldn’t have.
The year is 1978. Your blood pressure is 180 over 110. You feel fine. The doctor prescribes a pill. Clinical trials show that treating hypertension prevents strokes, heart failure, and death. You take it every morning. Nothing happens. That’s the point.
The year is 1980. The WHO declares smallpox eradicated. A disease that killed hundreds of millions in the twentieth century has disappeared from nature. Not treated. Not managed. Eliminated.
The year is 1996. Your brother has HIV. A decade earlier, the diagnosis was effectively a death sentence. Now doctors combine antiretroviral drugs. People who had months to live begin living for decades. Many will have near-normal life expectancies.
The year is 2014. Your father has hepatitis C. For decades, the infection has meant liver failure and cancer. Now he takes pills for twelve weeks. The virus disappears. A lifelong infection becomes curable in more than 95% of patients.
The year is 2019. Your daughter has cystic fibrosis. Her lungs are slowly failing. For decades, treatment meant managing infections and delaying the inevitable. Now doctors have a drug that corrects the underlying protein defect. Her breathing improves. Hospitalizations plummet. Predicted median survival rises from roughly 40 to more than 60 years.
The year is 2026. Your doctor has ten minutes and a screen. Your blood pressure is high, so the tablet is for life. Your cholesterol is high, so another tablet is for life. Your weight is high, so she offers an injection. The drugs have side effects. Not everyone needs them. But clinical trials show that appropriate treatment prevents heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, and death.
None of these treatments is perfect. None needs to be.
For most of human history, parents buried their children, infections killed healthy adults, and childbirth killed young women.
Today, global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Child mortality has collapsed.
Medicine has made terrible mistakes. We should remember them.
We should also remember the hundreds of millions of people alive because somebody got it right.
The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure.
The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe.
The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table.
The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties.
The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in.
The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior.
The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right.
The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house.
The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse.
The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it.
Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help.
You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time.
The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody.
The next one is being drafted now.
Bruce Greig retweeted
A Hampshire couple have been fined £600 and ordered to pay a further £6,000 in costs for allowing their 14-year-old son to work on the family's mobile food trailer.
Dexter, their son, enjoys it and has a passion for it.
That’s typical of the laws in this country. Encourage the work shy and penalise the hard working.
As if the stress on this family weren’t enough the family said they were tackling the dispute with the council while supporting eldest son Oskar, 17, while he received treatment for blood cancer.
@darrenpaffey @laboursatvir @carolinenokes
Parents fined for employing teen son in food trailer bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8vg…
Bruce Greig retweeted
🚨 Neuralink just delivered one of its most emotional breakthroughs yet
Terry, diagnosed with ALS in 2024, is now speaking again using only his thoughts.
The implant translates brain signals into words, with Grok Voice restoring his own natural voice.
Watching him hear himself speak again is incredibly powerful.
This is what restoring human connection looks like. Truly life-changing. As found.
“Password1, which, when checked against a third-party password strength tool…”
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"Front line" is not like the front in "Western Front". It seems civilians routinely cross to buy food and, um, collect their pension.
A lot of people ask: why don't those civilians leave? Why are there still 1,600 civilians still in Lyman?
Well, some cant leave, but most, who have remained there for the 5 years of war, choose to stay there, either because they are waiting for the Russian Army as "liberators" or because they have lived in their house their whole lives and don't know anything else. By this stage of a battle, its usually a combination of both.
One quite striking example was, when earlier this year where the frontline looked something like what is shown on the map, some of the civilians in Shandryholove, which was under Russian control at the time, would simply walk down the road from the village, cross over the frontline, and enter Ukrainian-controlled Svyatohirsk to buy food and medicine from a shop there, and then simply return back across the frontline to their homes and basements in Shandryholove.
This is, of course, only able to occur due to the very small number of soldiers on each side actually concentrated along the frontline, and those who are there being hidden away to avoid being detected by drones.
Something similar occurred in the Vovchansk direction earlier this year, where civilians living in the villages of Lyman and Synelnykove would walk south to the village of Buhaivka to buy food and medicine from a store and then return across the frontline to their homes. In Kostyantynivka, some older civilians would drive to Druzhkivka (before the city was on the frontline) to collect their pensions, and then return to Kostyantynivka, where fighting was already taking place within the city at the time.
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Bruce Greig retweeted
I went to go see a new build development a few weeks back- bit unfair to call it that, though, as there’s been a massive amount of (what I suppose is) landscaping and care ploughed into it.
This was one of the cheaper homes*, and the street it sat in.
We can genuinely just do things like this. It just takes care.
I’m going back in a week or two to meet the development team. I’ll report (somewhere) on why and how you can do high quality housing without needing to charge the earth.
*costs c10% less than a similar Taylor Wimpey home in a development 15 miles away.
Bruce Greig retweeted
$50K First Letters Prize awarded to Erwin Nieuwlaar for finding text in PHerc 343! This is the first time in nearly 2000 years that anyone has read text in this rolled scroll. Our papyrologists reckon it’s part of the expression πᾶ̣ν τ̣ὸ γιν̣όμ̣ε̣[νον, “everything that happens/is generated”
Bruce Greig retweeted
Hugo Duminil-Copin (médaille Fields 2022) : la résolution de 350 problèmes majeurs par OpenAI, c'est comme si des camions m'avaient écrasé ; tous les problèmes (et donc pistes de recherche) que je mentionnais dans mes exposés, articles et demandes de financement, ont été résolus.
The thing everyone seems to be missing: was Tommo already on bail?
According to Searchlight, he was awaiting trial for offences relating to the Dover protests:
searchlightmagazine.com/2026…
Breach of existing bail conditions is a reason to refuse bail on a new matter, isn't it?
How is it that Danny Tommo sits in a cell while five suspected terrorists are out on bail?
Is this two-tier Britain, or am I missing something?
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Bruce Greig retweeted
Twenty five years ago today, a 62 year old man with cancer in his bones walked 2,687 people out of the South Tower, and then he went back inside.
Rick Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall in 1939. British Parachute Regiment in Cyprus at 18. Colonial police in Northern Rhodesia. Then he came to America, enlisted in the US Army in 1963, and in November 1965 he went into the Ia Drang Valley as a platoon leader with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry.
Hal Moore called him the best platoon leader he ever saw. His men called him Hard Core. He sang to them in the dark, Wild Colonial Boy in an Australian accent, because he had worked out that men who are singing are not men who are panicking. That is Rescorla on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once and Young, bayonet fixed.
Thirty five years later he was head of security for Dean Witter, later Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
In 1990 he brought in his old friend Dan Hill and the two of them walked the basement. He warned the Port Authority that the parking garage was wide open, that somebody could drive in a truck full of explosives, walk out and light it off. Nothing was done. Three years later the 1993 bomb went off about thirty feet from the spot he had flagged.
After that he told Morgan Stanley the towers were still a target and the next attack would come out of the sky. He wanted the firm to leave Manhattan. The lease ran to 2006, so they stayed. Twenty two floors of the South Tower, roughly 2,700 people.
So he drilled them. Every three months, everyone, no exceptions, down the stairwells two abreast while he stood there with a stopwatch. Traders pulling seven figures resented being marched down concrete stairs by a Cornishman with a clipboard. He kept doing it anyway.
8:46 a.m. The North Tower is hit. Port Authority comes over the South Tower loudspeakers and tells everyone the building is secure and to go back to their desks. Rescorla picks up a bullhorn and tells his people to get out.
He phones Dan Hill. "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people out of here."
9:03 a.m. The second plane hits the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. His people are already in the stairwells, moving exactly the way they had been drilled, and Rescorla is on the bullhorn singing to them. Cornish songs. A version of Men of Harlech he had rewritten for Cornwall. Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming, can't you see their spearpoints gleaming.
He called his wife Susan from the stairs. They had been married two and a half years, met jogging in New Jersey. He told her to stop crying, that he had to get these people out safely, and that if something happened to him he wanted her to know he had never been happier, that she made his life.
Someone told him to get out. He said, as soon as I make sure everyone else is out.
2,687 Morgan Stanley employees went home that day. Thirteen did not, and four of those were Rescorla and the men who stayed in the building with him: Wesley Mercer, Jorge Velazquez, Godwin Forde.
He was last seen on the 10th floor, walking up.
The South Tower fell at 9:59. They never found him.
Bruce Greig retweeted
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
Bruce Greig retweeted
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
Bruce Greig retweeted
so apparently people are getting flown out of floods by drones in China now
like literally hanging beneath a giant DJI drone and getting flown to dry ground
it was during the recent floods in Guangxi, more than 400 drone pilots showed up with over 300 aircraft
> most of the drones carried food, water, and medicine into villages that roads and boats couldn’t reach
> then rescuers started using the biggest ones to carry people.
> one of them was DJI’s FC200, a cargo drone built to lift up to 440 pounds
> the drone lowers a cable and harness, the person gets strapped in, and a human pilot flies them out remotely using the live camera feed
> one rescue was absolutely insane
> a man was stranded on a roof in Liulan village with floodwater rising around him.
> the pilot swapped in a full battery, kept a second drone ready as backup, and sent the FC200 over the water.
> the man was secured with roughly four wraps of the harness.
> then the drone lifted him nearly 150 feet, threaded him past power lines and treetops, and flew him almost 3,000 feet across the flooded village.
> he reached dry ground 9 minutes later.
> the battery was down to 23%.
the obvious question for me is...
if a cargo drone can fly someone across a flooded village, how long until a purpose-built passenger version can fly me across a city?
i want drone Uber so badly lol
imagine opening the app, call a drone, buckle in, and fly straight over traffic
Bruce Greig retweeted
this is a critically important moment for cyber defense with AI; there is not much time to act.
we are happy if you want to work with us or any of our competitors or partners, but please take this moment seriously.
only an urgent and intense collective response will work.
Bruce Greig retweeted
I actually get what this lady is talking about. I trained as a database specialist but there was a time when good work was hard to come by. Just to make ends meet I did various agency jobs, most of which were low paid and meaningless. I did a couple of stints in call centres, both of which were hell on earth and totally pointless. One particular one was telesales, flogging travel insurance - which I simply couldn't do. I was useless at it and was fired.
I went through an entire year of being dismissed from various roles for not being a "team player". Modern commercial offices are hellscapes and some people are temperamentally unsuited to them. After a while it's just torture, and it's impossible to hold down a job when you don't see the value in what you do, or see an end point to it.
I never bought into this "dignity in work" horseshit when it robs you of your vitality and energy. Forcing benefit claimants into such work is not good for employer or employee. In fact, the unemployment system does make allowance for skilled people to find appropriate work before it imposes sanctions of any kind. The same should apply to any disability benefit - because forcing people into any old job regardless of its suitability can exacerbate mental and physical conditions.
The one way to ensure people stay in work is to help them into the right kind of work that's suited to their skills and temperament. The notion that any job is a good job only applies if its physically and mentally sustainable.
Reform's welfare for work policy amounts to little more than welfare chain gangs, coming from an entirely reactionary and vindictive place, but someone like this could be funnelled into charity office work like Citizens Advice (which can be both edifying and meaningful) which has a number of third sector career avenues.
This is more or less what I did. I was working a shitty job in PC World tech desk that was so miserable and abusive I quit, signed on the dole, and worked at a local disability charity for nearly two years. I built them a casework management system in Visual Basic - the first time I ever got my hands on a proper SQL server which gave me the skills I needed to later work at SSE, HBOS, Atkins and Airbus. It's been a net benefit to the taxpayer - and more useful to me than getting into debt for a useless degree. It just wasn't an official scheme. Forcing people into dumb menial jobs they can't actually do doesn't serve anyone.
