If you liked my words, follow my account. Documentary producer and director. Writes The Digger. Formerly Truthloader. Building things with AI.
United Kingdom
Joined July 2007
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There may well be something in Earth's orbit that predates the Sputnik satellite.
The story of @DrBeaVillarroel and her discovery of transient objects in space predating the soviet satellite is now available to read as a short comic. It's a great story and worthy of a broader audience
Big thanks to Phil Harper for this wonderfully cool comic series about the Palomar lights. Phil is a journalist with an amazing talent for telling stories through comics -- and seeing our research transformed into visual storytelling like this is can really make one’s day.
comics.phillyharper.com
@phillyharper
@BrianDoher37387
This is the exact kind of thing that precedes a war. A nation, or group of nations, defying the monopoly an international banking cartel run out of Switzerland. A 1% fee on all transactions makes you and your business partners the king of the world.
Protecting that dominance becomes life or death for the banking dynasties.
"I had a list of seven or eight things that I suggested to the Chancellor and I've been pretty gobsmacked that five of them were in the budget."
Martin Lewis, Founder of Money Saving Expert, reacts to Chancellor John Healey's first budget.
#Newsnight
Banks are the engines of growth?
What an incredibly self-serving (and totally incorrect) statement. Banks don't add a single thing to society that couldn't be done by government. They don't issue money, the Bank of England does. Commercial lending is trivially easy and nearly entirely without risk.
The premium we pay to these useless middlemen is entirely unnecessary. Abolish it.
🚨NEW: A UK bank chief executive, reacting to John Healey's decision to raise the bank's profit surcharge said:
"Taxing the engines of growth to reduce VAT on gherkins is end-of-Rome level of stupidity"
[@FT]
The UK is in a death spiral and needs a radical departure from politics as usual.
First: tear up the fiscal rules immediately. They're actually a subsidy for banks and pensions because the gov pays to borrow money which the government itself can issue. It's like Greenland paying a bank to issue ice.
Abolish the rules then tax reliefs can be radical enough to ensure these businesses can survive.
Well this was unexpected.
I did say we'd be releasing our models periodically...introducing Gemini 4 Carbon, our next frontier model.
Following Argon's release just two weeks ago, Carbon shows the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier, it ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of @ArtificialAnlys Intelligence Index at 59. It also leads across key cybersecurity evaluations scoring 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation, and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching.
We’re seeing significant improvements in long-horizon tasks even compared to Argon, and we’ve strengthened frontier safeguards.
As we did with Argon, we’re going to roll it out gradually + responsibly. Some trusted cyber defenders will get access starting this week. We'll be expanding it to more partners through our Fairwind Program, ahead of wider availability soon, so hang tight!
Phil Harper retweeted
Army chief says politicians to start 'frank conversation' with public to prepare for war trib.al/tnbIX0Q
Phil Harper retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
Just stop selling bonds and start printing the money directly, it's really as simple as that.
“The fasten seat belts sign is on”.
This is a message I received early this morning from one of the UK’s most experienced, savvy and respected financial traders. Someone I have come to know and trust for the last 25 years.
10-year bond yields are now almost 4.5pc - up some 50 basis points over the last month.
30-year yields this morning went above 6pc - a 28-year high.
Yet the UK’s political and media class continues to focus on party posturing and folksy rhetoric, ignoring the slow-motion disaster that has been happening on the UK’s sovereign bond markets for at least the last 18 months - a disaster that will inevitably, unless we drastically change course, turn into a fully blown market meltdown.
At that point, the UK government won’t be able to borrow enough money to finance our already spiralling debt interest bill.
Britain’s financial management will be taken over by overseas technocrats - that will be the condition of additional borrowing, to maintain the basic functions of the state, as happened in Greece and Italy back in the early 2010s and here in Britain 50 years ago this year (when we were forced in 1976 to apply to the IMF for a bailout).
The austerity then imposed on Britain would make 2010-2019 feel like a picnic - far, far worse than it would be if we took serious action now to control our public finances.
Lower-income households would suffer most - and there would be serious damage done to the UK’s already rapidly-fraying social fabric ….
I have been warning about these looking fiscal dangers publicly, in my newspaper columns and elsewhere, since at least early 2024.
Doing so hasn’t been easy or fun. I have been dismissed and derided by numerous economists, “economists”, officials and policymakers - as well as lots of journalists.
I absolutely don’t want a disastrous 1976-style outcome - which is why I’ve taken the blows and issued the warnings.
The state is too big. Public spending is out of control. Our fiscal rules are a convenient nonsense - designed to kick the can of financial reality into the future. We need to get real … and take bold action to tame the growth of spending, push back a now totally over-bearing state and snap the British economy out of today’s high-tax-high-borrowing-low-growth doom loop - the result of myopic, counter-productive policy-making by successive governments for the last decade and more …
Other prominent economists who agree with me - ie who are financially-literate, can read a yield curve, have a passing interest in economic history and who understand the dangers of some 80pc of UK government borrowing going on debt interest as it currently is - need to chuck “career risk” in the bin, and start saying publicly what so many of them have, for quite a while now, only had the bottle to say to me in private …
Remember: “The fasten seat belts sign is on”
Each huge leap forward is being leapfrogged in a matter of months. Incredible.
Announcing Gemini 4 Argon, our new frontier model.
Argon is built to sustain deep reasoning across complex, long-horizon workflows and delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense.
We’re also expanding the model’s output token limit to an industry-leading 1M tokens.
Argon is currently rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders in the Fairwind Program, with broader availability as soon as possible.
Its cheating on paper and also...just cheating. If you break rules to gain an advantage, and everyone else follows the rules, that's just cheating.
Gaining a massive unfair spending advantage in the transfer markets when others were forced to sell...is just cheating.
On paper yeah it’s “cheating” but let’s be honest it’s not is it, a billionaire bought a club outside of the big 4 and wanted them to be the best
He cooked the books to use his own money and make them a huge footballing power that’s now self sufficient
Wouldn’t surprise me if they get let off with a fine
They haven’t damaged the club they have improved it
They haven’t damaged the league they have made it exciting, the league now has 6/7 teams going for the top 4 positions
Let Newcastle do the same
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Violating rules is quite literally the definition of cheating:
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/che…
An independent commission found Manchester City guilty of serious breaches of Premier League financial fair play rules
premierleague.com/en/news/472777…
This means they cheated and so if we’re being “honest” we would call it cheating
I built a bank powered by Jev. The idea is very simple: you describe your project and why you think it deserves funding and hit submit. Jev looks at previous submissions, ranks how it creates economic benefit and independence for humanity, and instantly decides. Finds go to...
