Former Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque supported the critique.
In his speech today Andy Burnham promised to turn Britain into an "Innovation Nation" through decentralisation
But in AI - arguably the most innovative technology of all - he may find he is swimming against the tide
My analysis today for @SkyNews
Positive users praised the Sky News segment on Emad Mostaque's AI decentralization warnings for being informative and well presented, while negative users criticized mainstream media for late coverage or dismissed the ideas.
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Huge thanks to @dealroomco for their data and to @jessbreadman for producing - never easy with someone who doesn't write scripts and is still making the slides with a minute to go
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews really enjoyed this…. informative, engaging and well presented Great work!
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews Excellent shirt
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews It’s amazing how downstream mainstream media is. Sky should’ve been shouting about this months ago.
@rowlsmanthorpe @theobertram @SkyNews Nice, very specific, @dealroomco charts
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews Unless his plan involves slashing the NetZero lunacy and opening every north sea tap... Then he will achieve nothing.
I suspect he just means handing the UK people back to the EU slave masters
Btw if you are interested in this kind of thing, I have a newsletter where I go into things in more detail.
Last week: why data centres don't actually use much water
This week: an interview with David Barber, the man who's been given £30m to build a UK sovereign AI model https://open.substack.com/pub/rowlandmanthorpe/p/meet-the-man-building-the-uk-a-sovereign
This is an excellent segment from @rowlsmanthorpe. The politics of AI - both domestically and internationally - are getting a lot more complicated👇
In his speech today Andy Burnham promised to turn Britain into an "Innovation Nation" through decentralisation
But in AI - arguably the most innovative technology of all - he may find he is swimming against the tide
My analysis today for @SkyNews
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews Great stuff and great shirt 🫡
@Discoplomacy @SkyNews One of my favourites ☺️
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews This is great stuff and very informative, thanks!
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews This was interesting, you should post more of these and in more depth.
Britain urgently needs decentralisation, and while the firms can be HQd in London for financial reasons, there’s also an incentive to hire in LCOL areas outside it, although London is relatively cheap vs US.
@juanstoppa @SkyNews Thanks!
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews What a great segment, fantastic analysis!!!
@rowlsmanthorpe @realBenBloch @SkyNews His brain, like a lot of leftist brains, malfunctioned and froze in the 80’s and has never been fixed.
How do you increase innovation by further decentralising a service-based economy that will naturally tend towards clustering?
On AI investment, you're never going to eliminate labour-pool clustering, or adjacent 'problems' in industries like this. We're a small country that can't support many dense -- or, under some measure, evenly distributed -- networks of specialised talent / knowledge workers / infra / capital etc. These inputs for innovation compound.
I recall the ONS being forced out of London -- once a place where many talented statisticians, economists, and data specialists chose the civil service over industry (the ONS work on many rather uniquely interesting problems). Something like ~90% of its London-based staff left the ONS and remained in London, rather than move to Wales. A once-prestigious institution was hollowed out in the name of decentralisation (The Bean Review notes some of the damage to its capabilities & output quality as a result of the move). Now it's just another underpaying government department, struggling to attract the calibre of people it used to compete with industry for. Not something you can fix by throwing money at the problem.
The talent isn't going to move just because e.g., state-backed investment being moved out of London. The wages in London are already much lower than what equivalent talent could get in the US, which already sparsely exists outside of London (& a handful of university departments), and if you're going to remove the appeal of London itself -- with respect to QoL, the benefits of the aforementioned clustering effects -- the proposition the UK brings becomes even less competitive. As nuts as the US is, I'm not sure many London-based researchers are picking Newport or Manchester over San Francisco or Mountain View... Moving the jobs further away from the existing labour market does not create a new talent pool. Rather, it just makes the proposition less competitive.
It's unfortunate that Burnham doesn't seem too different from Starmer in terms of populist politics. It would have been a breath of fresh air after the Tories' hot mess. More fuel for the UK's multi-decade-long innovation furnace whatever the policy is going to be exactly, if that's the direction. God forbid we play to our competitive advantages instead of constantly stifling innovation!
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews Really interesting - more of this please
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews Very cool analysis! Just don’t forget the brakes! Which we are now building as specifically specified by Alan Turing! Just we forgot to read his later stuff! Especially his lost NPL 1948 paper!
@rowlsmanthorpe @EMostaque @SkyNews You cannot possibly believe that horseshit
@rowlsmanthorpe @SkyNews I call App Britain!
