About this episode

Calum and Tom discuss the implications of sovereign AI and the political landscape surrounding it.

Calum and Tom are back in the King Charles III Space Station bar, and this week they have a hit piece to enjoy. Prospect has run two thousand words on the online right under the headline “decline porn”, filed Anglofuturism alongside the doom-scrolling aesthetics accounts, and decided the whole project is aestheticised cope that lets the right avoid thinking seriously about Britain’s future. Best of all, it commissioned an illustration: five enormous, union-jack-tattooed Anglofuturists emerging from the darkness to menace the magazine’s readers. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Mythos, said to be the best hacker in the world several times over, has been held back, and the US government has now banned roughly all non-citizens from its other model, Fable — a ban that reaches even the AI Safety Institute, the British body that built a world-famous testing capability and can no longer run evals on the leading models. Calum’s gloss is the line of the episode: if it is not your national model, you are going to be a vassal. From there it is a tour of what sovereign capability actually looks like — Cosine, the British startup fine-tuning air-gapped coding models for banks still running on COBOL no…

People in this episode

Hosts: Calum Drysdale, Tom Ough

Topics covered

• sovereign AI
• political commentary
• technology ethics
• British startups
• national security

Keywords

• Anglofuturism
• sovereign capability
• AI models
• British technology
• political analysis

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Prospect, Anthropic, AI Safety Institute, Cosine, Lumen Sovereign

Products: Mythos, Fable

Books & works: decline porn

Places: Bristol, King Charles III Space Station

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