Global tech growth Prev @Klarna, @Wise, and @UKHouseofLords
Often on the road
Joined May 2008
- Tweets24.5K
- Following3.4K
- Followers3.4K
- Likes90.4K
Pinned Tweet
Wow @fintechf thank you! I couldn’t be more blessed to be amongst these amazing women #swashbucklers fintechf.com/homebox/fintech…
Flora Coleman retweeted
Seeing some bad takes on British Government AI funding: some notes.
1. The Government has announced a tranche of funding for a number of different AI-related organisations and initiatives. It comes to roughly £600m (excluding private sector input.) This has led to a series of partisan bad takes by people who don’t really follow this conversation. That is annoying because only I can have partisan bad takes.
2. Two common takes: “this is nothing, AI labs spend hundreds of millions every day/month etc! We can’t compete! Common British L” Or “Government is terrible at picking winners and investing, should be left to the private sector.” These takes reflect usually partisan pre-existing notions, neither actually understands what this money does or doesn’t do, and neither actually examines what the money is going towards either. Apples to oranges type stuff.
3. Let’s break down two of the more significant sets. The first is more funding for AISI (+£120m), and the second is for a new AI Biosecurity Lab (£100m, + around £200m from frontier companies).
4. AISI is the world’s best resourced institute doing this work and leading in its class. Don’t take my word for it - feel free to read MI5 Chief’s recent speech, or any number of expert statements from frontier companies. IT IS NOT a frontier AI company competitor. IT IS NOT designed to produce cutting edge LLMs or agents or consumer applications. It is, effectively, a research organisation staffed by clever people whose job is to analyse what frontier AI companies are working on and test their stuff. So if you’re measuring this announcement of investment and saying “it’s nothing compared to what AI firms spend”, you’re comparing totally different things. Instead, look how much spending Britain’s AISI gets relative to its international counterparts on getting access and insight into this frontier.
5. The UK’s AI Biosecurity Lab (AIBL) is even newer than AISI, and a world first. IT IS NOT a competitor to private sector biolabs. IT IS NOT an example of Government intervening and ‘picking a winner.’ Its job - modelled after AISI - is to “develop technical capabilities that help the UK better understand, prevent, detect and respond to biological threats.” It will do this by attracting best in class talent + working with frontier companies + working with the UK’s wider biosecurity landscape + other agencies.
6. Both of these organisations represent continuity in British Government thinking: ‘AI brings with it a whole bunch of positive things, but also risks. We should create organisations that attract top talent to help us analyse and understand this technology.’ You see this in MI5’s recently launched AI Threat Assessment Centre (AITAC) and the AI Economics Institute (AIEI) launched earlier this year. You can absolutely think this is the right or wrong approach btw but that’s the broad strategy.
7. So the comparisons to frontier companies’ spending is just misplaced. You’re working yourself into a tizzy over a misunderstanding of why the state is allocating resources. You shouldn’t compare these to frontier companies, but instead to other AISIs or other foreign govt AI investments I guess. Finally, if I asked many of those commenting what they would do differently, I would guess they wouldn’t really know.
Huge. British Govt announces:
• £165m: National AI Biosecurity Initiative: Includes £100m for a new AI Biosecurity Lab, using AI to detect emerging biological threats.
• £120m: AI Security Institute (AISI): Additional funding to strengthen AI risk research and evaluation.
• £70m: National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (NERV) Centre: Identifying vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure.
• £60m: National Cyber Shield: Strengthening Britain’s cyber defences.
• £60m: UK Sovereign AI: Expanding investment into physical and industrial AI.
• £60m: R&D Procurement Scheme: Supporting companies developing AI security and NHS innovations.
• £30m: Mayoral AI Partnerships: Helping local businesses adopt AI, create jobs and improve public services.
• £23m : AI Economics Institute: Research into AI’s effects on productivity, employment and living standards.
• £18m: UK Advanced Chip Design Academy: Developing domestic semiconductor design expertise and reducing overseas dependencies.
Flora Coleman retweeted
Today we're setting out a British approach to AI: backing innovation and growth, managing risks responsibly, and making sure the benefits of AI-enabled growth are felt right across the country.
Flora Coleman retweeted
To everyone affected by today’s Telegraph cuts, I have great sympathy, losing a job on a Friday must feel a double whammy.
There’s understandably been lots of discussion about high-profile journalists like Amol Rajan and Marina Hyde building their own media businesses. /1
Flora Coleman retweeted
👀
Election fever has already spread beyond Westminster. Last week a Lib Dem councillor told HQ that he had tried to order some new Correx boards - the plastic placards used in election campaigns - only to be told the company could not fulfil the order for another month because it would be using all of November to complete a large order for the Labour Party.
From today’s weekend long read with @whazell
Story 👇
inews.co.uk/news/politics/in…
Flora Coleman retweeted
Huge. British Govt announces:
• £165m: National AI Biosecurity Initiative: Includes £100m for a new AI Biosecurity Lab, using AI to detect emerging biological threats.
• £120m: AI Security Institute (AISI): Additional funding to strengthen AI risk research and evaluation.
• £70m: National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (NERV) Centre: Identifying vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure.
• £60m: National Cyber Shield: Strengthening Britain’s cyber defences.
• £60m: UK Sovereign AI: Expanding investment into physical and industrial AI.
• £60m: R&D Procurement Scheme: Supporting companies developing AI security and NHS innovations.
• £30m: Mayoral AI Partnerships: Helping local businesses adopt AI, create jobs and improve public services.
• £23m : AI Economics Institute: Research into AI’s effects on productivity, employment and living standards.
• £18m: UK Advanced Chip Design Academy: Developing domestic semiconductor design expertise and reducing overseas dependencies.
1/7 I have two simple tests for British AI, driven by our values. Is it safe? And is it ours to shape? 🇬🇧
Today, Chancellor @JohnHealey_MP is announcing a major, ambitious package of investment to strengthen Britain's defences against emerging threats, back British innovation, and build our technological independence.
Flora Coleman retweeted
Honoured to be featured in the @WSJ Innovators Issue. I’ve always believed in the power of human ingenuity to solve our hardest problems. I’m confident we can collectively navigate the potential challenges of frontier models and usher in a new golden age of scientific discovery!
From childhood prodigy to AI pioneer to Nobel Prize winner, Demis Hassabis has always had a simple plan. Step one, solve intelligence. Step two, solve everything else. 🔗 on.wsj.com/4i0Axoo
Flora Coleman retweeted
Prime Minister @andyburnham has written to businesses attending our dialogue this week, recognising mid-market companies for their role in driving growth in every postcode.
🤝 @biztradegovuk @NatWestGroup @Intuit
wiltonpark.org.uk/idea/prime…
Flora Coleman retweeted
If you ever needed evidence that perceptions in AI world ≠ perceptions in the outside world, it's this polling in today's POLITICO Decoded newsletter by @calder_mchugh, @MuiChristine and @samjsutton.
Most American voters think:
-- Dario Amodei is a Republican
-- that Anthropic employees lean Republican
In fact, US voters are now so pre-disposed to see the AI sector as right-leaning that even a fake tech CEO that pollsters invented was pegged as Republican.
And btw: A third of those polled don't even know who Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are.
politico.com/newsletters/dec…
Flora Coleman retweeted
I’m sad to hear this - not just for the investment and AI capability the UK is losing, but also for Essex.
It’s completely unacceptable that our grid capacity, high electricity prices and draconian planning system are holding back this country yet again.
Flora Coleman retweeted
Billions of pounds lost on a single project because we can’t connect it to the grid for half a decade and have destroyed our capacity to generate reliable electricity.
Exclusive: Microsoft cancels UK data centre deal with Nscale. Comes just as Nscale hopes to pull off a $35 billion IPO telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
Flora Coleman retweeted
🚨New Inquiry 🚨
MPs launch entrepreneurship inquiry
New inquiry examines prospects for tech visionaries, small traders, online sellers, side hustles and skilled tradespeople alongside innovative start-ups
The Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee is today launching an inquiry into what it takes to start and build a business in Britain - from selling on eBay or running a market stall to becoming a self-employed tradesperson or founding a visionary technology company.
With its newly expanded remit now extending to science and innovation, the Committee will examine whether people across the country have the support, market access, finance, skills, confidence and resilience to turn an idea into a living and a living into job and wealth creating firms.
The inquiry will put the outlook for everyday entrepreneurs firmly in the spotlight: small traders, eBay sellers, people building side hustles, market traders, and the nation’s white van men and women, alongside technology and business innovators and ground-breakers. MPs want to understand what helps them get started, what holds them back, and what would make it easier to build a sustainable business, take on a first employee or train an apprentice.
The inquiry builds on the Committee’s recent work on small business and investment which highlighted high business costs and difficulties accessing finance, turning now to the crucial first stages of enterprise.
Entrepreneurial activity in the UK is at its highest level since 1999, with one in five adults either starting or running a new business. Yet opportunities and outcomes vary significantly between regions, sectors and demographic groups. Fear of failure remains a substantial barrier.
The Committee will examine how government can help make Britain the best place in the world for entrepreneurs to start up, scale and stay. It will explore:
•What prompts people to start a business, and what stops others from taking the plunge.
•The outlook for small traders, online sellers, side hustles, market traders and self-employed tradespeople.
•Access to start-up finance, practical advice, skills and support.
•The journey from sole trader to employer, including the costs and challenges of hiring a first employee or taking on an apprentice.
•How education, science and innovation can support business creation.
•Whether government policy meets entrepreneurs’ needs, and what Britain can learn from other countries.
Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP, Chair of the Committee, said:
“I know from the personal experience of building a fast-growing tech business that building new firms from scratch is hard but an experience like none other.
“For centuries, our entrepreneurs have been making history by inventing the future and today Britain’s enterprise spirit can be found in every research lab, on every high street and in every white van.
“These are people working hard to build a living and take control of their future. We want to hear what stands in their way and what government must do to help. Britain should be the best place to start a business and build it to last.”
The Committee welcomes evidence from entrepreneurs at every stage, including people running side hustles, sole traders, employers and those who have tried to start a business but faced barriers.
Evidence submission details here: committees.parliament.uk/wor…
Flora Coleman retweeted
“So yeah everyone thought Ramp was just corporate cards
But Eric & Karim’s whole ethos is saving you time and money so they built a Codex/Cowork competitor
And it’s actually better because they’re a third party trying to save you money instead of a lab selling you tokens”
Flora Coleman retweeted
I'm hiring!
This is an exciting new role for someone who wants to chart new paths for Ramp data. Where should our data show up, but doesn't today? Who should we collaborate with on new economic research projects?
We're looking for new ideas from people who are as excited as we are.
Flora Coleman retweeted
What an amazing moment.
There's a lot of doomerism around AI at the moment.
So much so that it's easy to forget how amazing the technology is and the opportunity it presents us.
@ElevenLabs "has now been used to restore the voices of more than 11,000 people who have lost their voices through injury or illness"
This must be truly life-changing for those who've been able to get their voice back.
Today, Baroness Campbell of Surbiton delivered a speech in the @UKHouseofLords using an AI recreation of her voice, built by ElevenLabs. A first for the UK Parliament.
Baroness Campbell has spinal muscular atrophy, which affects her speech. The Baroness has now created an AI voice that replicates the tone, rhythm, and pitch of her original voice.
Our technology has now been used to restore the voices of more than 11,000 people who have lost their voices through injury or illness, and we’ve committed to help one million people living with voice loss around the world.
Flora Coleman retweeted
One of the most underrated things about AISI: the open-source testing infrastructure it builds and shares openly with the whole field.
Last week we released Transect - a tool that turns the increasingly complex agent evaluation transcripts into interactive timelines.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. A quick tour:
Transect runs on AISI's Inspect platform. Inspect is an open-source framework for evaluating frontier AI models across coding, reasoning, agentic, and multi-modal tasks. We open-sourced Inspect in May 2024, and it's become the standard evaluation platform used by frontier AI companies and safety orgs including AI security bodies in the US, EU, Japan and South Korea.
Inspect is also expanding thanks to those from safety institutes, frontier labs and research groups who use it. Anthropic built Petri on top of it. The Allen Institute chose it as the foundation for AstaBench. It's available through AISI's GitHub, which you can access here: inspect.aisi.org.uk
Inspect was the gateway to a suite of custom-built and open sourced eval tools. A few more AISI has released:
- Inspect Cyber - build and run agentic cyber evals, from simple CTFs to full cyber ranges.
- Inspect Sandbox - plugins for agentic eval environments. We use it internally; it's helped CAISSI, METR and Apollo adopt open-source sandbox providers too.
- ControlArena - built with Redwood Research, for running AI control experiments. Already used by Redwood, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and MATS. It shows up in OpenAI's GPT-5.6 system card.
- Inspect Scout - transcript analysis. Turns thousands of transcripts into structured results, surfacing failure modes and safety-relevant behaviours.
Underlying Inspect is the AISI Engineering Playbook - an open guide to the infrastructure behind our frontier evals written by AISI's Engineering team, so that organisations wanting to stand up their own eval capabilities don't need to start from scratch. aisi.gov.uk/blog/releasing-a…
Flora Coleman retweeted
EXCL: Chancellor John Healey has rejected calls by senior Labour figures to equalise capital gains tax to the same level as income tax, amid warnings that such a CGT increase would hit Britain’s attractiveness to investors. as.ft.com/r/74376c0e-c9d5-43…
