Investor. Chairman @BeZeroCarbon. Co-founder @SASCapital. Ex-Goldman (commodities). Building @BritBlueprint - fix our growth crisis: https://teapawt.net/t.co/MkAapW6iQ3
London, England
Joined September 2013
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Adam Knight retweeted
The internet is going into a LOCKDOWN.
Hundreds of millions of websites are potentially at risk from cyberattacks.
Governments, banks and major platforms have already taken their websites OFFLINE.
Many are already calling it “Black October.”
At the centre of the shutdowns is something most of us have never heard of, but use every day.
PHP, the software behind roughly 7 in 10 websites, has two critical flaws that can let hackers break in without a password.
Dubbed PHP2Shell, both are rated 9.2 out of 10 for severity.
Details began circulating on Oct 20. Emergency fixes arrived the next day, but attackers were already moving.
Cloudflare’s CEO says hacking attempts then jumped from thousands to MILLIONS within hours.
Cybersecurity agencies across several countries are telling PHP site owners the same thing: Patch it now, or take it offline.
Websites have gone dark worldwide, from government portals and hospitals to banks.
CrowdStrike warns these attacks leave almost no trace, so some sites may not know if they’ve been hit.
Around 2.6 MILLION internet-facing servers run PHP, potentially hosting hundreds of sites each.
Over 1.1 million use older versions no longer receiving official PHP updates.
Older installations may need an upgrade to a supported PHP version or a fix from their software provider.
And patching does not remove a backdoor an attacker may already have planted.
Cloudflare also says hackers are now tweaking their attacks to try to slip past its protections.
But PHP isn’t the only security story unfolding.
-Japan’s Onamae suspended ALL Desktop Cloud plans after malware was found on customer servers.
-India’s eMudhra had 8 website-certificate keys so weak, one was literally the number “4”.
-State Bank of India confirmed 3,897 customer records on the dark web.
-Criminals used AI agents to break into 400+ Latin American banks.
-Capcom confirmed a breach exposing 11.7 million email addresses.
-GitLab disclosed a 10/10 severity flaw in versions going back to 2014.
-LiteLLM removed a malware-containing release. Railway reported possible exposure of customer secrets.
None of these has a confirmed link to PHP2Shell.
We’re seeing separate breaches unfold together.
The true number of incidents could take months to come out.
The world is still on alert. Attacks are still coming.
Adam Knight retweeted
A plain-language note on the PHP security issue
21 October 2026
This is a short explanation of the critical PHP problem that has taken many websites offline today.
What happened
On 20 October 2026 the people who maintain PHP announced that two serious security flaws had been found in PHP itself. They scheduled an emergency update for Wednesday 21 October at 10:00 a.m. Eastern / 15:00 BST.
PHP is the language that many websites use to build pages, talk to databases, and handle logins and forms. It runs on the web server, not on the computer of the person visiting the site.
The two flaws are serious enough that government cyber agencies in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Australia have told organisations to update PHP immediately, or take the affected website offline until they can.
What is actually broken
The problem is inside PHP’s own code, in a feature called “session upload progress.” That feature has been turned on by default in PHP since 2012. It watches file uploads and stores progress information before the rest of the website’s code even runs.
A carefully built upload request can abuse that feature and make the web server run whatever the attacker sends. In plain terms: if a website is running an unpatched PHP, someone on the internet can potentially take control of that website’s server.
This is not a bug in WordPress, or in a game, or in Windows. It is a bug in the PHP engine those websites sit on top of.
Who is affected
Affected
Any website or online service whose server runs PHP and is reachable from the internet.
That includes a very large share of the web: WordPress sites, Drupal, Laravel, Magento, phpBB, Joomla, MediaWiki, many company portals, and a lot of game-studio websites, forums, and store pages.
Shared web hosting and some network appliances that quietly include PHP.
This is why game companies have taken their websites down. Their public sites and account pages run on PHP. The games themselves do not.
Not affected
A normal Windows or Mac computer used for work or gaming.
Steam, GOG, Epic, and the game programs on those machines.
Any server or service that does not run PHP at all.
What people should do
If you run a website that uses PHP
Find every place PHP is installed, especially anything the public can reach.
Apply the PHP update as soon as it is available from php.net or from your hosting provider.
If you cannot update today, take the public site offline or cut it off from the internet until you can.
After the update, watch for further notices from the software that sits on top of PHP.
A temporary setting (session.upload_progress.enabled = Off) can reduce the risk while you wait for the real patch. It is not a substitute for the update.
If you only visit websites and play games
Nothing to install. The sites that went down will come back when their operators finish the PHP update. Your computer and your games are not the thing being patched.
How serious is it
Each of the two flaws is rated 9.2 out of 10. They do not require a login. Security firms expect automated attacks to begin within minutes of the public patches, because some technical details leaked early. That is why the advice is “patch now, or take the site offline.”
Official notices
United Kingdom, National Cyber Security Centre
ncsc.gov.uk/news/critical-se…
European Union, CERT-EU Security Advisory 2026-018
cert.europa.eu/publications/…
PHP project advance notice (the source of the scheduled release)
php.net/archive/2026.php#202…
CVE records
cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-202…
cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-202…
Adam Knight retweeted
This is perhaps one of the great ironies of our time: China is increasingly shaping the future of AI, yet very few people in the West have the faintest idea how its key thinkers see it - its philosophers, sociologists or ethicists.
As is too often the case, we - much like the frog in the well - assume our own AI debate covers every possible view, when much of it springs from the same cultural soil, built on assumptions about what defines us that we don’t even know we’re making.
Take for instance the assumption that intelligence is a key part of what makes us human. It’s so intuitively obvious to us that we literally named our species after it - Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man").
If you think about it, just this assumption explains a large share of the anxiety: if intelligence is what makes us human, then artificial intelligence - or super intelligence - threatens the very thing that makes us us: we’re about to compete with artificial or super “us”. No wonder this feels existential.
But China has a tradition of thought as old as ours, if not older, and every bit as rich and sophisticated, which never placed intelligence at the core of what makes us human, and so meets the thinking machine from a completely different starting point.
Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”.
Sounds pretty important to hear him out, don’t you think?
Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines.”
You could even go back to antiquity, when, in many ways, we started asking questions about AI.
Did you know, for instance, that Aristotle, in the Politics, imagined a world where “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them”, and wondered about the social order consequences of this (mostly whether slaves would still be needed)?
There are Chinese equivalents to this. For instance, in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist classic, you’ll find a similar thought experiment, with a completely different worry attached. An old gardener is watering his vegetables by hand, hauling water out of a well jar by jar. A visitor shows him a labor-saving device, and the gardener turns it down for the reason that whoever uses machines ends up with 机心 (jīxīn), a “machine-heart” - a mind that schemes, calculates and loses its simplicity. “It is not that I do not know [the machine],” he says, “but I should be ashamed to use it.”
Two labor-saving machines, two very different questions: where Aristotle wondered what automation would do to the social order, the Zhuangzi wondered what it would do to us, on the inside. Which, you’ll notice, is exactly Liu Yongmou’s worry, more than two thousand years earlier.
In fact, as we’ll see, 心 (xīn), the heart, is a motif that runs deep through the Chinese AI debate. It appears both in the fear, from Zhuangzi to Liu Yongmou, that machines could give us a “machine-heart” and its mirror image: the ambition to give machines a heart of their own. Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, wants “to set a heart for machines” (为机器立心, wèi jīqì lì xīn).
“Heart” in the Chinese sense, that is, which differs totally from the Valentine's Day fluff we’ve reduced it to. 心 (xīn) means heart and mind at once: it’s where we feel but also where we think, tell right from wrong and care for others.
And, crucially, it’s in the heart that the quality Confucianism sees as the very definition of a human being takes root: 仁 (rén). We need two words to translate it, “benevolence” and “humaneness”, but in Chinese they’re one and the same: to be benevolent is to be human. It’s not about intelligence.
This is the entire point of my new article: to step out of our well for a moment and peer over the edge of China's.
What you’ll find there will, I think, surprise you, with questions you’d never thought to ask: from Zhao Tingyang warning that AI’s bad consequences can at least be fought, but that “humanity may die of all the good things AI creates”, to whether the fear that AI will make us “useless” rests on the false premise that a person is worth what they’re useful for.
A premise that a 2,300-year-old Taoist tree, which survived precisely because it was useless, demolished long ago. Could our predicted uselessness turn out, much like that tree’s, to be our saving grace?
Chinese thinkers’ answers to these questions are, I think, among the most interesting anyone has given to the defining question of our time. Whether or not you agree with them, they’re the intellectual backdrop of a country shaping much of AI, and with it our future: you might as well know what they think.
Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…
Adam Knight retweeted
Wow. I woke up to an impressive number of upset people who apparently don’t understand how LLMs work and can’t cope well with me pointing it out.
An LLM is a statistical next-token prediction model. That’s how it works. It’s an extraordinarily sophisticated calculator performing math you could theoretically do by hand (if you were sufficiently masochistic).
Math doesn’t know what it’s calculating. Pi doesn’t spend its evenings contemplating the nature of circles, and c doesn’t ponder the relationship between matter and energy.
That doesn’t make the results any less accurate, impressive, or useful.
Between inference requests, an LLM isn’t sitting around thinking. It isn’t reconsidering its answers, wondering whether it made a mistake, contemplating its existence, or questioning whether it’s conscious. Its weights remain fixed (it doesn’t learn), and computation resumes when it receives input.
We know this because we designed these systems. The architectures, mathematics, implementations, and research are extensively documented. You can study them yourself.
Of course, some people immediately lean into comparisons of biological intelligence or philosophical debates over consciousness because that is what they know.
But biological intelligence and artificial neural networks are fundamentally different systems. Similar outputs don’t establish equivalent internal experiences.
I experience consciousness directly. I infer that other humans do too because we share biological structures and processes. We don’t have equivalent evidence for an LLM, and nothing about its known operation gives evidence of conscious experience.
Which brings me back to my original point.
To me, understanding is conscious comprehension. It means being aware of information, recognizing its meaning, and experiencing that comprehension. If I wasn’t conscious I could not understand.
We can perform actions unconsciously. We can produce correct results without knowing why they’re correct. But I distinguish those capabilities from consciously understanding what we’re doing.
An LLM can solve complex problems, explain difficult concepts, and produce remarkably accurate information. I give it full credit for those capabilities.
But producing an answer that we rationalize as understanding isn’t the same as experiencing understanding.
You don’t have to agree with my definitions. We can debate functional understanding versus conscious comprehension all day, but that won’t establish whether an LLM actually experiences anything.
The right debate is this…
Could machines exhibit something different from human consciousness, something measurable, meaningful, and worth studying?
I think so, absolutely!
I’m entirely open to discussing “machine consciousness” in terms of observable, testable computational properties. We built these systems, we can instrument them, examine their internal mechanisms, and investigate what they’re capable of.
That seems far more productive than endlessly arguing over whether a machine experiences life the way humans do.
So here’s my question:
How would you define machine consciousness, and more importantly, how would you measure it?
Adam Knight retweeted
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Adam Knight retweeted
The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.
worksinprogress.co/issue/the…
The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:
- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.
- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.
- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.
- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.
- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.
This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.
Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.
Adam Knight retweeted
Peter Thiel makes a very important point in his latest interview: we moralise far too much. Think German Energiewende.
Thiel explains that moral judgement has increasingly replaced functional judgement. Instead of asking whether something actually works, we rush to classify it as morally good or evil.
The confusion starts with the word “good”, because it has two completely different opposites:
- The moral opposite of good is evil.
- The functional opposite of good is bad.
These are two entirely different axes. Yet public discourse increasingly folds them into one. Particularly the progressive left wants to occupy the moral high ground. So everyone virtue-signals — or pretends to, often without the slightest competence to judge the virtue in the first place.
Enter the climate crisis. Too much CO₂ is declared evil. Overnight, everybody knows we are in a climate emergency. Any doubt becomes morally suspect. After all, the IPCC consensus has declared it so. A Ferrari can now be declared morally “evil” because it burns too much fuel. Yet it remains an exceptionally good car.
And here lies the political trap: once something has been declared morally good, its advocates start treating that moral classification as evidence that it is also functionally good — that it actually works. And even if it works demonstrably worse, it doesn’t matter. It’s virtuous..!
But obviously the two may have absolutely nothing in common. A policy advertised as virtuous can be functionally terrible: incompetent, ruinously expensive or incapable of achieving its stated objective. Worse, once all its consequences are counted, it may turn out not to have been virtuous in the first place.
Germany’s Energiewende is the textbook example. Nuclear was morally branded “Hochrisikotechnologie” by @Die_Gruenen — high-risk technology — from the 1970s onwards. Dangerous. Irresponsible. Wind & solar became the virtuous alternative: “renewable”. And once that moral hierarchy was established, the engineering and economic questions became irrelevant: Does the resulting electricity system actually work better and cheaper?
Of course not. Nuclear power was one of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century: enormous quantities of cheap electricity from tiny quantities of energy-dense uranium, virtually no operational CO₂ emissions, little land use and dispatchable generation from massive rotating machines that also contribute to grid stability.
More importantly, it is also one of the safest forms of electricity generation mankind has ever developed. Yet German Greens spent decades morally slandering it. And Germany was hardly alone. Across much of the West, nuclear became something morally suspect rather than an extraordinary feat of engineering.
Doubt, rather than gratitude, accompanied nuclear. The doubt of the ignorant. Yet by some obscure moral code, ignorance itself suddenly earned a seat at the table. Expertise became optional; moral conviction became qualification. A child could command a global audience on questions of energy systems. How dare you?
Meanwhile, physics doesn’t care about false virtue signalling. A TWh of solar is not functionally identical to a TWh of nuclear — not at night, not in winter and not even at noon on a summer day if it is generated in the wrong place or exceeds consumption at that moment.
Why? Bc an electricity system has never been about producing enough TWh over a year. It has always been about timing and location too. Electricity must be produced at the precise time and location it is demanded, while generation and consumption must remain continuously balanced because the grid itself cannot store electricity.
That is Thiel’s message: The Energiewende — replacing nuclear with wind and solar — proved neither functionally competent nor virtuous. It was one gigantic $2 trillion amateur hour.
Peter Thiel:
I think we moralize way too much.
And there's always a question I like to ask: What is the antonym of good? The moral antonym is evil. The functional antonym is bad.
A Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn't get many miles per gallon. A Trabant is a bad car. It works. It's less good than a Golf car, you know, the former East German car.
So, you know, if you're evil, you're at least competent. And if you're evil, you're not bad, and therefore you're actually maybe kind of good because you're at least getting something done.
I think it's better to be good than evil.
Adam Knight retweeted
Every year @BritishProgress asks Britain's top economists and policy researchers what the UK should do to increase growth.
🚨 As covered exclusively for @thetimes this morning, the 2026 growth survey results are now in! 🚨
This was our biggest survey yet with over 100 responses.
📉 The bad news: Britain's public finances, with inflation hit by external shocks, are in a bad state.
📈 The good news: the UK is not without options. There is much that can be done on the supply side reforms, & smarter fiscal policy can raise revenue while supporting growth.
Here are the 12 most interesting results 👇
*1. Where should the government prioritise spending political capital?*
We asked "In what areas should the Government invest more (or less) political capital to achieve growth?"
NB this was explicitly not a question about spending – that's the next one.
Adam Knight retweeted
How the 1934 discovery of brainwave entrainment survived decades of commercial hype to become a validated MIT validated clinical intervention for Alzheimer's and a modern tool for mental sovereignty.
Learn how.
readmultiplex.com/2026/07/16…
Adam Knight retweeted
Forget Plato's Cave
The learned helplessness experiment bothers me more.
In 1967, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier ran experiments where dogs were exposed to shocks they could not control. Nothing they did stopped what was happening.
Later, the dogs were put into a situation where they actually could escape. They just had to cross a small barrier. They didn't.
They had already learned that trying was pointless. The door was basically open and they still stayed there. Some pretty ugly implications for humans.
Keep someone in a system long enough where working harder changes nothing. Complaining changes nothing and following the rules changes nothing. Trying again changes nothing.
Eventually they might stop trying. Then one day an opportunity appears and everyone looking from the outside says, “Why don't they just do something?”
They already did.
A hundred times.
People don't rebel when conditions get bad. Not always.
People will shut down and withdraw. They distract themselves and accept shit they once would have fought against. They have learned that fighting changes nothing.
Who has to convince people that the cage is good? You don't.
You need to convince them the door doesn't open.
Eventually you can unlock it and they will never even check.
Adam Knight retweeted
I am increasingly frustrated about the state of conversation about AI in the UK. It feels like we are in never ending cycles of deluded thinking. Under current trends, Britain will be defenceless against the transformative effects of AI and have no leverage over development at the frontier.
We are the most exposed economy to AI in the world. We have very little data centre capacity and few credible plans to expand – and our high energy costs mean we would struggle to even if we tried.
I am publishing a paper today on what the UK should do to build that leverage, let the economy capture value from AI and prepare the state to adapt, however AI develops.
The three strategies are as follows:
1. Build the infrastructure that gives us leverage. Fix the grid, fix planning, make Britain a place frontier AI can run.
2. Let the economy capture the value of AI. Reform the regulatory, labour and talent barriers that stop British firms adopting AI.
3. Build a state that can adapt to a changing world. Build a tax base that survives the labour market changing, public services that use AI to deliver better, and capacity to weather the upcoming geopolitical storms.
Two years ago, we published a similar report on AI - many recommendations of which ended up in the action plan. I remember feeling hopeful, but sadly the fundamental problems facing the country on AI have not shifted. I truly hope that this week of momentum culminates in action. There’s still a narrow path for the UK, but everyday that path is narrowing.
Adam Knight retweeted
Worth watching: "It is not a genocide; it is a counterattack in a war."
This should be pushed far and wide. Watched in every college class in the U.S. Thank you @billmaher The moral confusion is gross. "It is not a genocide, it is a counterattack in a war...Gaza equals genocide is a lie, an easily provable lie (as I have argued from first hand observations in Gaza). The fact that so many democrats go along with it is to me the party's worse moment since they undid reconstruction after the civil war...words have meaning...genocide, kill or try to kill an entire people, you can't just change the definition of genocide to mean counterattack in a war where people including civilians die, that's every war..."
Adam Knight retweeted
Know your enemy — it’s not Israel, it’s Iran
This is superb by Maurice Glasman
thetimes.com/article/84457c0…
Adam Knight retweeted
We failed the moral test of 9/11. 25 years on, the West is overrun with Islamist freaks. Our young sing the praises of Islamist armies like Hamas. And anyone who says Islamism is evil is branded Islamophobic. Oh God what have we done?, asks Brendan O’Neill
buff.ly/nsPS3Mb
Adam Knight retweeted
this is one of the greatest, most profound monolgues ive ever witnessed in the middle of a casual conversation about psychedelics and hippies.
its so unbelievably good. I love Jesse so much, man.
Adam Knight retweeted
With AlphaFold we mapped the protein universe - now with AlphaGenome Atlas we’re charting the human genome. It can predict the impact of all 9 billion possible single-letter DNA variants, helping scientists better understand disease. Freely available for academic research: alphagenome.google/atlas
Adam Knight retweeted
The cost of intelligence is going to zero. The value of human cognition will go negative. The economy will change forever.
We need new institutions to navigate this transition and ensure the benefits are widely distributed.
Today we present the Champion.
Truly Sovereign AI.
Adam Knight 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…
Adam Knight retweeted
1/ I'm a cardiologist. I've practiced for twenty-five years, through a lot of "breakthroughs" that turned out to be press releases. So understand the weight of what I'm about to say: I have never seen a single week in medicine like the one we just lived through.
In the span of a few days, four separate scientific breakthroughs landed. The stock market treated them as four unrelated stories and sent a handful of biotech companies soaring. But that's the shallow read. Look closer and they are not four stories at all. They are four faces of the same story — the biggest shift in medicine since the discovery of antibiotics.
Medicine is becoming programmable. Individualized. Written for one human being instead of the average of millions.
Let me walk you through exactly what happened, in plain language, and show you where this is actually headed. Because the future arrived quietly this week, and most people scrolled right past it.