These coffee shops are part of a chain created by two venture capitalists. And the thing that makes the business model work is a background level of automation.

Instead of employing a dedicated barista, the chain relies instead on $50,000 Eversys espresso machines. There are staff to take orders, operate the machines, and complete other tasks, but the actual coffee-making is mostly taken care of by a set-up that can make the product faster than a human can.

This week, Blank Street raised new funding that pushed its valuation to $650m. Co-founder Issam Freiha told the Financial Times that the vision is to build it into a “daily luxury brand”.

Today I’d like to propose a theory about Blank Street Coffee and what it tells us about where consumers will and won’t accept the replacement of human labour with automation. I think the chain suggests a future where the visibility of mechanisation and computerisation is kept to a minimum, but the tech enables a kind of minimum baseline of everyday luxury. On top of that, even if technology enables even greater ordinary abundance, that will not be enough for companies to compete – instead they’ll have to do as Blank Street does, and win the war with branding.

A few months ago I wrote about the shape that robotics will take in our lives for Unherd, focusing on the debate over whether mainstream versions of the technology will take a humanoid form factor or not.

As part of the research for that piece, I spoke with , director of London’s Society for Technological Advancement ( here on Substack) and a robotics researcher. He had many interesting things to say, but it was a brief comment at the end of the interview that stuck with me. He pointed to Blank Street Coffee as an example of the public accepting automation into their lives, partly because it’s happening “in the background”.

We had been talking about cultural differences, and whether the UK had any unique characteristics that might affect how automation plays out here.

Boguslavskiy had recently been to Japan, and observed the cultural differences between there and here. “I think people are much more accepting of vending machines in Japan than they are here. And because of that, I think that a lot of automated kitchens will have better success in Japan than here.” In the UK, he argued, people would rather not know.

I’d agree with that idea. People will happily take the product at a cheaper price if that’s the result of automation, but they don’t necessarily need to know a robot has made it. A vending machine or a robot barista is too on the nose, but some new machinery behind the counter is fine.

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This got me thinking a lot about what level of automation we are willing to accept, not as workers but as customers. And if you want to see what level of labour replacement the consumer is comfortable with, you need only look to the hospitality sector.

Ordering face-to-face has, in many quick-service restaurants (QSRs), been replaced by touchscreens and apps. It’s a fine balance. Leon founder John Vincent has been threatening to do away with the chain’s touchscreen ordering system since he took back control of the business, holding them up as an emblem of everything that went wrong in his absence. Yet a year after that reacquisition, every branch I’ve been to recently still has the screens.

These obviously save worker time for the business, but they’re often more convenient for the consumer too. Pre-order your lunch salad and pick it up instead of wasting half your break in a queue. Keep drinks coming to the table on the Wetherspoon’s app instead of pausing your conversation to go to the bar.

If the other half of these transactions also become at least semi-automated – a pint-pulling robot arm, a burrito bowl-making machine – will the consumer notice? Will they care?

I think they mostly won’t. But they might if a) the product gets worse, a problem that’s resolved through improving the technology and/or competition between providers or b) the automation is not sufficiently in the background. I still think there’s a long way to go before humanoids are striding across the floral expanse of a Spoons carpet, tray in hand. Their human counterpart will still be required to bring out the tray even after the Diageo Guinnessbot 5000 has poured a whole round in 60 seconds flat.

What does all this have to do with Blank Street? The chain is, to me, experimenting with what can be stripped out of the concept of a “café” and how much of that shortfall can be made up with a combination of automation and branding.

In-the-background automation is beneficial for the business’s bottom line, and potentially for the consumer as well if it cuts waiting times and eventual price. But on its own it’s not enough. Blank Street Coffee may have used automation to compete on price, but the same could be said of McDonald’s and Greggs. Blank Street reaches a different segment because of its look, vibe, and marketing.

Indeed, the creative branding world is fascinated with Blank Street. The business “shows what happens when a coffee brand leans hard into the culture feed, and starts to be treated more like a fashion or lifestyle player than a utility”, conclude the consultants at Sense Worldwide.

Creative strategists on the Side Projects podcast compare the brand to makeup chain Sephora or big dumb cup maker Stanley. Mass brands that sweep through largely young audiences through online imitation and an aura of desirability that is just about accessible. They also pointed out that the clean blandness of the brand makes it something you can project anything onto. “It’s like the Benson Boone backflip of coffee.”

Whether it’s your cup of matcha or not, Blank Street is demonstrating demand for a product that requires less human work than the artisan equivalent, yet is seen as more desirable than other automated options.

This suggests a winning formula will be in-the-background automation + astute branding. An online grocery shop with the aesthetic clout of Delli but the hidden robotic logistics of an Ocado fulfilment warehouse. A laundry service that has the lifestyle appeal of Aesop and everything is folded by humanoids. A Yard Sale Pizza rival produced by an entirely robotic dark kitchen.

Some of these basically exist already. And of course, as robotics charges ahead, we might expect to see changes on a much broader scale. But sometimes, that progress might also appear in its subtler form: a proliferation of little daily luxuries.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🖥️ The team at Public First is hosting a drinks for young professionals or “YoPros” in tech on 3 September.

🚄 A fun episode this week about ’s proposal to put autonomous pods on Hammersmith Bridge.

💂 The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill has entered the Lords committee stage. Tech UK’s Doniya Soni-Clark has a quick analysis of its significance – and also points out that this is yet another DSIT relic that has yet to be given a new departmental home.

🌦️ The next Land Talks is on Tuesday 22 September. The lightning talks announced so far will cover social housing, street improvements, and land data.

💷 The Post Office has finally signed off on a replacement to its scandal-ridden Horizon system. I still think the impact of this whole debacle on public mistrust of technology is under-appreciated in tech circles.

💡 The red telephone box can save Britain, writes in Unherd.

🏢 The former Google DeepMind offices in Kings Cross are now officially the Isomorphic Labs offices, per eyewitness accounts (me and a friend).

The guy ahead of me was told his ‘Pending’ status wasn’t enough. You had to have been approved, because hundreds of people had registered to be let into the tiny, bright orange coffee shop on its opening night.

Corgi Cafe, a venue run by a San Francisco insurance startup, came to London last week. Corgi, which was founded in 2024 and went through Y Combinator’s summer batch that year, already has a 24-hour café on the ground floor of its California offices. Other openings are imminent in New York and Atlanta. There’s talk of dozens more. I went to the official launch party on Saturday for the London one, which is situated on Great Eastern Street.

Inside, an ordinary retail unit had been turned into an Easter egg hunt for references to the brand. Any available surface had been painted orange. A buffet presented turmeric smoothies with corgi stickers, wraps stuck through with corgi toothpicks, and corgi-shaped biscuits with orange icing.

The crowd, consisting mostly of developers, founders, and the etn. crew, packed in to chat and greet the real-life office corgi, Archie.

Unusually for a London evening event, though perhaps expected for a Gen Z tech gathering, there was no alcohol in sight. Thanks to the smoothie, I probably left healthier than when I went in.

Coffeehouse culture

Corgi is not the only tech firm to have aligned itself with café culture lately. The list is growing almost too long to keep track of. Anthropic took over Air Mail branches in New York and London. Granola turned its office into a coffee shop for a user research morning1. Cursor periodically takes over cafés and invites users to come by. Elevenlabs served customers with a robot barista at New York Tech Week. This week another YC alum, Fabraix AI, paid for Monzo employees to pick up a free coffee at their local Black Sheep2.

But a permanent space is quite a different proposition to these one-offs.

“We want it to be like a permanent installation,” Corgi’s head of underwriting Josh Shih, who is leading the London expansion, told me a few days before the grand opening.

Instead of a one-weekend-only deal, they want to create a more regularly frequented hotspot. “It’s the space that you can keep coming back to and connect with people.”

The café is just the most visible part of Corgi’s expansion to the capital. The firm now has an office in Shoreditch and is hiring for more than a dozen roles here. London was an obvious choice for the business to expand, Shih said, in part because of the talent.

“We think that there’s a lot of amazing people in the UK that don’t necessarily have the opportunity to go to the US, or want to stay in the UK and work really, really hard alongside us.”

The city’s position at the heart of the global insurance industry is key as well. Shih pointed out that Lloyd’s of London, the famed insurance market, is not far away.

That got me thinking about the original coffeehouse culture. Lloyd’s, of course, started life as a coffeehouse during something of a golden age for these kinds of gathering places, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Along with Jonathan’s, Garraway’s, and other esteemed establishments, London’s coffeehouses served as places to get the news, discuss important matters of the day, and make deals. They were sometimes known as “penny universities” because of the amount one could learn by visiting them. These places also gave birth to many elements of the insurance and financial industries that we associate with the City today.

The historian Matthew Green has even argued that the arrival of coffee as a beverage powered this explosion of innovation.

“Remember — until the mid-seventeenth century, most people in England were either slightly — or very — drunk all of the time,” he writes. “[…] The arrival of coffee, then, triggered a dawn of sobriety that laid the foundations for truly spectacular economic growth in the decades that followed as people thought clearly for the first time.”

Of course, those traders and poets and merchants didn’t have laptops. They didn’t even have their own newspapers, often sharing a copy by reading aloud.

Modern working culture, with long stretches looking into one’s screen, would seem to be the antithesis of that. Shih noted that Corgi is known for having a “9-9-6” culture (9am-9pm, six days a week). The space is largely being pitched as a place one can go to keep working when everything else is closed.

But in practice, there’s definitely something other than overly caffeinated grindslop going on here. As I’ve noted time and again, people have been looking for more in-person ways to hang out and get involved in scenes since Covid.

The truth is there are countless places to work, not least at one’s own office or at home. The attraction to a venue like Corgi Café therefore has far more to do with at least the prospect of human connection – especially with likeminded people. Even the original coffeehouses tended to be favoured by particular professions or party allegiances. If Whigs and Tories could each have their own coffeehouse, why not vibecoders?

Real-world presence

Corgi staff have trailed more cafés to come in Europe, including more in London. Nevertheless, the choice of a site just a few minutes from Old Street Station for the first opening was interesting. This is, of course, an area with probably hundreds of tech offices and a reputation as Silicon Roundabout, even if it can be overshadowed by the King’s Cross Quarter these days. But it’s also one that can be a little tricky commercially.

Attendant Coffee, which occupied the unit for 12 years prior to Corgi, closed its Shoreditch branch earlier this year. The chain’s founder Ryan De Oliveira wrote on LinkedIn that the area had “changed”.

“Office footfall never properly recovered post-pandemic, vacancy rates remained high, and costs continued to rise. The model that worked there for years no longer worked in the same way.”

Meanwhile most of the retail units inside Old Street station are still to let, two years after a major refurbishment was completed3.

Corgi Cafe offers something quite different. It’s more of a destination, and the team anticipates holding around four events a week to keep bringing people in.

I think coverage that treats Corgi Cafe as a gimmicky new hospitality business, like a Cereal Killer Cafe for tech bros, misses the point. While it’s open to everyone as a café, it feels more like an evolution of the office-as-community-space model we’ve seen at Granola, Marker, and others in the area. It’s definitely becoming more common to be public about the location of one’s office, painting the frontage a bright colour, or routinely invite people to come by.

In other words, even as the work they do can seem abstract, tech companies increasingly want to exist in the real world, even at a time when IRL businesses have it tougher than ever.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🖥️ The incomparable is launching Spark Grants, small cheques for new initiatives that create local ‘activation energy’ in the UK.

🇬🇧 The FT wrote a profile of Cosine AI and its mission to build a British sovereign frontier AI model.

🚄 London-based frontier AI research lab Inherent Labs has published research on the performance of Faraday, its 27B-parameter AI scientist. Detailed thread here and the full paper is here.

💷 Blair-son #2, Nick, is seeking $200m for a new defence startup.

💡 Another interesting physical-world marketing trend: brands are printing newspapers.

🏢 Sifted broke the news that Google DeepMind researcher Jack Parker-Holder is targeting a $500m fundraise for a new London neolab.

🪙 I enjoyed Jack Davey’s rather grumpy review of Corgi Cafe in The Critic.

Hassabis will stay on as chairman, become chief scientist of Alphabet, and will turn more of his attention to Isomorphic Labs, the AI for science spinout that houses DeepMind’s breakthrough AlphaFold technology.

When news like this rocks the timeline and Alphabet’s share price, commentators are quick to make two kinds of arguments. The first is that it is a huge deal, a major turning point. The second is that it’s a totally expected move, that the markets are overreacting, and that this would have been obvious if you’ve been paying any attention at all.

Both can be true at once. Reporting from Axios and others confirms that the transition has been a gradual one. The announcement, writes on Sources, was “closer to a formality than a bombshell”.

There’s an interpretation of this as a personality issue. Reed Albergotti writes for Semafor that Hassabis “struggled to get satisfaction out of being in the role of a tech executive, rather than a visionary scientist”.

I’ve written before about Hassabis’s penchant for cultivating his image as a scholar with an almost divine calling to study the secrets of nature. In Sebastian Mallaby’s biography of the founder, it is always to scientists – Newton, Oppenheimer, Feynman – that Hassabis compares himself. Not to Ford, nor Gates, nor Jobs.

In British tech circles, Hassabis’ public persona becomes that of a kind of saviour. He is our Nobel-winning knight of the realm, defender of London’s AI scene; a patron saint and a patriot.

In this context, it is easy to see this week’s announcement as a blow to the UK. The reorganisation at Google consolidates power in Mountain View. Kavukcuoglu is US-based, working on a desk alongside Sergey Brin. That makes California, not London, the engine room of the company’s AI strategy.

Without Hassabis in the driving seat, then, is Britain’s AI advantage under threat?

Let’s hope not. If the London tech cluster is so reliant on one person, then maybe it was never as strong as it appeared.

But I don’t believe this has to be the case, not least because companies that generate flywheels do not always remain at the centre of them. Nor does everyone involved in its success stay there. That’s sort of the point.

Not one of the original PayPal Mafia is still with the business. Indeed, that company is now reportedly the subject of a takeover attempt from Stripe, a rival that was built partly with the backing of early PayPal execs Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Companies are not static. They contain people who can leave and rebuild something new elsewhere.

This is what has happened to DeepMind – drop by drop in recent years and then in a flood during the past few months. David Silver left to create Ineffable Labs. John Jumper, with whom Hassabis shared the Nobel Prize, is joining Anthropic. Tim Rocktäschel left to set up Recursive Superintelligence.

The dispersal of the DeepMind diaspora is likely to continue apace. I’m hearing already from startups and scale-ups in London that they expect to be able to pick up new hires from Google, as staff recognise the end of an era. Others will start their own companies.

This moment could therefore be the impetus for a reshuffling of talent across the board. The challenge will be keeping those people in the British ecosystem rather than losing swathes to the US. That’s an ecosystem-wide effort, not something you can depend upon one man to achieve.

I don’t mean to understate the impact that Hassabis has had on Britain’s standing in the tech world. Nor to dismiss the possibility that his future work at Isomorphic Labs might yield more significant achievements. But reifying him as the only hope for the UK was always going to end in tears. To be a serious global player, London’s tech scene has to be strong enough as a network to survive shifts in its components.

Perhaps Saint Demis has a few more miracles in him yet, but the congregation can’t just sit around waiting for them.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🏢 Data centre firm Nscale is doubling its London office space, writes in City A.M.

💂 New term for the King’s Cross tech quarter just dropped: calls it the “New Palo Alto”.

🌦️ This isn’t a newsletter about Google, but there’s plenty of interesting analysis out there about what this week’s developments mean for Alphabet’s stature in the AI race. I recommend reading both on DeepMind’s long-term failure and on why he wouldn’t count Google out just yet.

🍟 Chip startup OLIX raised a Series B that put its valuation at $3.3bn.

💷 Not UK-related, but American farming accounting software startup Ambrook raised a Series B and founder Mackenzie Burnett told at Upstarts that the plan is to start expanding into more areas of the real economy. Anyone doing something similar in Britain?

💡 Still making up my mind on this issue, but I enjoyed ’s piece challenging the government’s plans for vocational education at 14.

🪙 Robinhood has secured a crypto licence in the UK, putting it in good stead ahead of the new regulatory regime.

So it was notable when a short film came across my feed earlier this month that looked less like a demo day or a documentary, and more like Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. “The Maison is opening”, read the intriguing caption.

Put out to announce the launch of “mind computing” startup Voyage, which has just secured its first funding round, the video features the company’s founder Khalil Ismail reading a poem of his own composition. Against the backdrop of an English country house, he and other figures stroll around the maze and the dining hall, while electronic music worthy of a Balenciaga show plays.

I had many questions after watching it, so I found Ismail’s website (where he lists not only his credentials but favourite writers, philosophers, and fashion week collections) and got in touch.

“We wanted to subvert the idea that frontier tech companies have to be unsexy,” he tells me on a call from San Francisco. “I went to art school and engineering school, and I think this DNA of having both sides is really important to us. So we wanted to lead with the artistry.”

One certainly gets the sense from Ismail’s CV of someone who is not content to be pigeonholed on one side or the other. He has written poetry since he was a teenager, and has studied or worked on technical challenges as varied as product design, spatial computing, wearables, and memory augmentation. He has a penchant for a full plate, often doing two or more projects at the same time.

“I’ve always grown up between two general worlds of technology and liberal arts,” he explains. His time at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, though, was a turning point for how he thought about combining the two. “I almost saw art school as the antidote to big tech.” It inspired him to think of the two worlds not as separate categories but as more of a symbiosis.

The short version of what Voyage does, or hopes to do, is to fill a gap in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. By capturing and translating brain signals into commands, this type of technology promises to remove a layer between thought and action, removing the need to type, speak or use eye movements.

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Most people are familiar with the field because of Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, which makes coin-sized devices that can be implanted in the skull. But it’s a field with a surprisingly long history, going back to the 1970s. More recently, it’s been a frequent source of good news thanks to a series of scientific breakthroughs, including advances in helping disabled people to communicate. China is also gaining ground here, having approved the world’s first commercial invasive BCI system earlier this year.

But Ismail believes there is still something missing from the ambitions of scientists and companies building these solutions: a reason for consumers to adopt them. While there have been some new products designed to be non-invasive (i.e. not implanted into the body like Neuralink), they’re not always appealing to the eye, usually resembling chunky headphones or swimming caps.

Voyage approaches this space with an aesthetic question: What do people actually want to wear?

This isn’t just a question of how to sell these devices to consumers, Ismail argues, but a vital problem to tackle in order to advance the technology.

“For the past few years we’ve sort of stagnated in our ability to miniaturise, and also collect data,” he says. “The biggest bottleneck in neuro is just naturalistic data.”

Getting that information is crucial, as we’ve also seen playing out in robotics, but requires more real-life usage. Voyage’s hope is that a non-invasive product, which is actually seen as desirable by the wearer, will increase consumer adoption, and be the best way to expand the datasets.

“If we focus on the desire problem as a deep tech company, then we’ll solve a lot of the technical hurdles that we have.”

Based on that thesis, Voyage just raised an undisclosed amount in a round led by Draper Associates. Follow on funds came from Upside Ventures, the University of Oxford, Olive Tree Capital, Genesis Fund, and angel investors.

To deliver on the vision, Ismail believes that the commitment to design and desirability has to come from inside the organisation, rather than just resting on collabs between tech and fashion, à la the Kylie Jenner Meta glasses.

“It has to happen from the inside out, and that’s why I think a new kind of company type was needed to do this. You can’t do it in a traditional lab.”

The ‘Maison’, a couturier-inspired term, is the company’s “outer shell”, he explains. For that, he’s hiring people in creative roles, including at least one Artisan/Maker. Then Voyage is the R&D core of the project, currently recruiting “Technical Philosophers”. Every org chart needs a bit of lore.

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Though Ismail says his heart is in London and feels a company like this could only come out of Europe, much of his hiring energy at the moment is necessarily focused on the Bay Area. “We have some really great institutions, and for anything neuro, bio, ML, the UK is incredible. But for applied hardware, I struggled to find people.” So for now at least, the company will be split between London and San Francisco.

And what will the resulting product actually look like? Ismail keeps it vague at this stage. When you watch the launch video again, there are subtle details that might just be decorative, or might be clues about where the company thinks wearables are going. Everyone is wearing sleek metallic accessories – over-ear cuffs, armour rings, watches. In this vision, BCIs of the future could look normal. Chic, even.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🖥️ For further reading on the launch video boom, I really recommend this interview by with Afterimage. They didn’t make the Voyage video but have been behind many other timeline-dominating films of late.

🇬🇧 Many projects and teams are still in limbo following the DSIT closure last week. Data Center Dynamics reports that a new home for AI Growth Zones, for example, have yet to be decided

🍦 This evening event with speakers from Raycast, Notion, and OpenAI on the 13th of August looks interesting.

💷 The FCA is launching a new push to revive London share trading, per the Financial Times.

💡 Sebastian Mallaby has a couple of quibbles in his review of Theo Baker’s new book How to Rule the World.

“Not to be confused with the defunct Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (2007–2009), Ministry of Technology (1964–1970) or Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (1916–1965).”

DSIT itself can now join that list of defunct names. Indeed, governments may change quickly in this country, but Wikipedia editors move faster; the page already notes that DSIT “was” a government department.

There has been plenty of excellent analysis over the past few days of what the dissolution of the department means for the UK’s relationship with technology. I include several in the links roundup below. But my regular readers will know that, perhaps perversely for a newsletter about the future, I have a preoccupation with the recent past.

In this case, the story of DSIT as the latest attempt at an innovation department tells us something about the challenges and triumphs of governments trying to embrace new technology.

Chapter one: The forefront

DSIT began similarly to how it ended: a new Prime Minister, leaked plans, and a reorganisation of government.

On Monday the 6th of February 2023, The Sun reported that Rishi Sunak was plotting a mini-reshuffle which would involve splitting the Business department into three parts.

Sunak, who had been in power for just over 100 days after succeeding Liz Truss in late 2022, was keen to make his mark. He had also just sacked Nadhim Zahawi, who had been found to have broken the ministerial code, from his position as Conservative Party chairman and minister without portfolio.

But it wasn’t just the vacancy that prompted the reorganisation. Sources told Bloomberg at the time that the PM had not been impressed by the hefty Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) in recent years, with too much focus on energy and not enough on pro-business and innovation policies. He had told colleagues he wanted to be the PM who advanced the UK’s standing on science and technology.

As Chancellor, Sunak had previously shown enthusiasm for the tech du jour, supporting the launch of a plan to make the UK a global cryptoasset hub and even commissioning an NFT for Great Britain. But just a month into his premiership, the stakes had changed when ChatGPT was released to the public. This seemed to demand more concerted action.

So DSIT, Sunak and his team wrote in its foundational briefing, would “focus on positioning the UK at the forefront of global scientific and technological advancement”.

The fact that science and technology was given its own department and “cabinet-level teeth”, says former civil servant Ed Bithell, is “something which I think strengthened his ability to push through stuff like the Bletchley Summit, creating the AI Safety Institute, and so on”.

The week DSIT was born, Bithell, who now heads up strategy and sovereign partnerships at AI chip startup Fractile, had been drafted temporarily onto the staff of Sarah Munby, then Permanent Secretary at BEIS. As soon as the announcement was made, things changed rapidly.

“The starting gun is fired around 9 A.M on Tuesday. I believe, within an hour and a half, Sarah Munby and quite a lot of her people had moved into 100 Parliament Street, where DSIT was to be, and just started doing this new work and setting it up.”

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Some were automatically reassigned while others had to make quick decisions.

Abigail Morris, who was Director of Communications for BEIS at the time, found out about the restructuring only when it was reported in the papers. The creation of a new department opened up a new equivalent role to hers at DSIT, and she had to choose whether to take it or stay put. “To be able to start a new department again from scratch, I thought, was an amazing opportunity,” she says. “By midday the next day, I was in post.”

Then as now, not everyone was happy about the speed of the changes. Laura Gilbert, who was Director of Data Science at Number 10 at the time, also found out about DSIT’s creation from the papers. Speaking to a colleague at the time, she expressed frustration.

“If you wanted a tech department, I said, you should have hired one, experts from industry, not just moved random civil servants around,” she wrote on LinkedIn yesterday.

But it was too late. The first Secretary of State, Michelle Donelan, was appointed. Staff moved offices. And DSIT’s mission began.

Chapter two: The road to Bletchley

In Spring 2023, about two weeks after the creation of DSIT, Entrepreneurs First co-founder Matt Clifford was brought in to advise on the design of what was then known as the Frontier AI Taskforce.

When that work was completed in June, Songkick co-founder and venture capital investor Ian Hogarth was appointed to lead the taskforce.

Upon arriving at DSIT, Hogarth was surprised to find there was just one AI researcher: Nitarshan Rajkumar, one of many people who put their PhDs on hold to join the department over its history. Now working in international policy at Anthropic, Rajkumar “has materially influenced many of the bold efforts that the UK has been making to invest in frontier AI Safety” Hogarth wrote in his first update on the taskforce. “We need more Nitarshans!”

Bringing in more Nitarshans would become one of the defining features of DSIT. As well as big names, it could attract those in the start or middle of their careers – often potentially very lucrative ones – to join up, either as permanent civil servants or on temporary ‘tours of duty’.

“It had a remarkable density of talent,” one former secondee from that era tells me. “Ambitious, hard-working civil servants who had worked on Brexit and Covid, and who were now applying themselves to deliver huge results in a tiny amount of time. And able to draw on external expertise – Hogarth, Clifford, [Henry] de Zoete, [Jade] Leung – as well as people putting PhDs and start-up plans on hold, or taking 75% pay cuts to do a tour of duty”.

The impact of Covid is worth dwelling on. The Frontier AI Taskforce was modeled on the Vaccine Taskforce. Some of the Government’s other tech initiatives, like the Number 10 Data Science Unit and to some extent ARIA, had come directly from the crisis. DSIT took some of that get-things-done attitude on board.

“We felt like we were able to move fast and break things,” says Morris.

Those first six months were reasonably eventful. The department published a National Semiconductor Strategy in May. The UK rejoined the Horizon Europe and Copernicus programmes for the first time since Brexit. Donelan went on ministerial maternity leave and was covered in the interim by Chloe Smith. Upon her return, she began working on possible regulatory approaches to AI with the publication of a white paper.

The Taskforce beefed up, bringing Ollie Ilott over from Number 10, then poaching Jade Leung from OpenAI. Hogarth got his wish of more Nitarshans, increasing the number of years of AI research experience on the team from just three years in June to 150 years by October. This was especially remarkable given that many had to take pay cuts, as well as deal with the hairshirt restrictions of government offices; I understand that at least one of the DSIT buildings didn’t have free tea or coffee, nor even mugs and glasses in the kitchen.

It wasn’t just from the outside world that the department was able to draw talent. Clifford points out to me that “an underrated thing about DSIT is how it attracted people from across Whitehall who were seen as top performers”. That included Ilott, Ollie Jones and Daisy McGregor, and Imran Shafi. The two Ollies are still there. McGregor is now Anthropic’s UK policy lead, and Shafi is UK managing director for Nscale.

Meanwhile, planning was taking place in the background that would lead to one of the department’s signature moments: the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. Clifford took a sabbatical from EF to lead the effort.

It was a sprint from August to November to get everything arranged, but the end result made headlines globally, with major attendees including Elon Musk, Kamala Harris, Ursula von der Leyen, and Sam Altman.

All this at the relatively small historic site of Bletchley, with hundreds of journalists running around as well as live BBC coverage. “It was incredible to work on,” says Morris “To pull off a summit with only a few months’ notice. Personally, I’d never really done that kind of operational comms.”

The EU and 28 countries signed a declaration pledging global coordination on AI risks, and encouraging transparency from developers of frontier models. Not everyone thought the tone of the conference went far enough to acknowledge catastrophic risks, but it was a start.

The event also marked the evolution of the Frontier AI Taskforce into the AI Safety Institute. This gave it permanence and an annual budget beyond its initial £100m investment.

Many people contributed to making all this happen, but Rishi Sunak’s personal passion for technology seems to have enabled the entrepreneurial spirit with which AISI was set up. “There was a sense that the Prime Minister wants to recruit a specific set of people, with a specific set of skills, from outside the government, and they are not going to accept being paid £40,000 a year,” observes Bithell. “And he made that happen with his personal authority.”

“I don’t think you can take for granted that it would have happened under a different PM, necessarily.”

That leadership, though, was to change in just a few months.

Chapter three: Under new management

Following the Labour landslide in the July 2024 General Election, Peter Kyle was made the new Secretary of State the next day.

It was then almost immediately announced that teams including the Government Digital Service, the online public services provider behind GOV.UK, and the Incubator for AI would be moved from the Cabinet Office to DSIT.

Going on the interview rounds, Kyle framed the move as an expansion of DSIT, which would add a new Digital Centre for Government. “It didn’t start because we wanted to hold power and resources in the DSIT department,” he said. “We started by asking: what needs transforming in our economy and our society?”

Though it was all-change at the top, some familiar faces returned. First, former Chief Science Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, who had become something of a household name during the pandemic, was appointed Science Minister.

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And then there was Clifford. Again based in Number 10, as the PM’s adviser on AI opportunities, he worked closely with DSIT as he began his magnum opus, the AI Opportunities Action Plan. Staff at the time recall that although he didn’t have a desk in DSIT, he would often come in and get out a laptop to work alongside them.

In the meantime, Kyle settled in. “The job is the steepest learning curve that I’ve ever had,” he told PoliticsHome that October. “It is totally unrelenting. There are two doors to this office. Usually, when one door opens and some people leave, the other door opens and people are coming in.”

One of his big challenges was that the previous government had not ended up passing new AI legislation, and the Labour manifesto had promised “binding regulation” on tech companies. But after just a few months, the view inside government was shifting.

Chapter four: Vibe shift

In January 2025, the AI Opportunities Action Plan was published, making 50 recommendations for how the UK could best enhance the possibilities of AI – from infrastructure expansion to attracting talent.

“Business-as-usual is not an option,” Clifford wrote. “Instead, government will need to be prepared to absorb some risk in the context of uncertainty.” The Government adopted all 50 of the recommendations.

Charlie Harris, who now works as a member of technical staff at AI for bio startup Boltz, arrived in Whitehall excited to help execute the strategy.

“Maybe I’m just looking back at rose-tinted glasses but it was a huge deal to get the whole of Whitehall to agree to the Action Plan.”

But where the AISI side of DSIT was now replete with technical experts, Harris found that the directorate he was joining had just one technical expert: himself.

“My background is only in AI for bio so when I joined I thought I was going to be working on that, maybe a bit of AI for science more generally. Then it turned out I was the only one who knew deeply how AI worked, and knew why, for instance, having frontier GPUs were important.”

With a handful of others, he set to work on delivering one of the recommendations, the creation of a Sovereign AI unit, becoming its Technical Lead. One of its first key projects was co-ordinating the OpenBind consortium, which would build a huge dataset on how drugs interact with proteins. He spent two months doing “Whitehall acrobatics” to get the agreement over the finish line, getting it done just in time for London Tech Week.

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We should pause here to note something a little more nebulous around this time, which was a vibe shift in the ways AI was being discussed on the world stage.

At the AI Summit in Paris in February of 2025, a successor to the Bletchley summit, American Vice President JD Vance gave a much-discussed speech warning that “safetyism” and over-regulation would stifle the new tech before its benefits could be realised.

That same week, AISI changed its name. It would no longer be the AI Safety Institute but the AI Security Institute, reflecting a focus on serious AI risks.

This same mood fed into the Alan Turing Institute squabble over the summer, in which Kyle urged the body to focus on national security and defence. Criticism of the ATI had been building for quite some time, and the Secretary of State’s intervention eventually led to a leadership overhaul.

Meanwhile, the AI bill was kicked down the road. Over time, the idea of a comprehensive bill was dropped.

This might have all fed into momentum for those keen to supercharge AI, but things slowed down in the latter half of the year. Clifford, who had been a force for raising ambition in meetings, stepped down from his position as the PM’s AI adviser in July 2025. Without him, there was a lack of direction in some quarters.

And even with the presence of high-flyers, DSIT could never quite escape the fact that it was a government department, with all the potential for slowdowns that creates. Workarounds like direct appointments could dodge civil service hoops, but then leave top performers unable to get promoted.

There were practical challenges also .When he first got the job, Harris was told he was needed straight away – but onboarding took six months to complete. Upon arrival, although he’d been expected for months, there was no laptop ready for him. In that first week, he recalls sitting reading documents his boss had printed out, and communicating with others in the department via leaving Post-It notes on their desks.

Chapter five: Kendall & Kanishka

Breaches of the ministerial code really are excellent plot engines.

In September 2025, after Angela Rayner was found to have breached the code and promptly resigned, Keir Starmer kicked off a new reshuffle. Kyle was made Business Secretary, which left his job open at DSIT. Liz Kendall filled it, coming over from the Department for Work and Pensions – a move she reportedly saw as a demotion.

But the real story was the appointment of a junior minister, Kanishka Narayan. He replaced Feryal Clark as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for AI and Online Safety.

A former VC, he had already banked kudos in the tech industry by speaking knowledgeably about AI issues. He also had a young team around him, who helped launch fun projects and videos that showed off his hands-on approach to tech. Commentators said he “got AI”.

This period saw the engine of SovAI get going again, with the appointment of VC James Wise as its chair in November 2025. Josephine Kant joined the following February. The project, now the Sovereign AI Fund, finally had its public launch in April and then brought in Suzanne Ashman as managing partner.

The US-UK Tech Prosperity Deal should probably have been the key achievement of this era, and indeed it provided an easy first win for Kendall when it was signed in September of 2025. But by December it was on ice. Talks restarted earlier this year.

The rollout of the Action Plan also continued with the selection of the first AI Growth Zones. As of today, 38 of the plan’s 50 commitments have been met.

New projects emerged, like the creation of an AI Economics Institute last month. And one of Starmer’s last big announcements, a social media ban for under-16s, fell within DSIT’s wheelhouse. None of this seemed to be harbinger of imminent demise.

Chapter six: The end

Despite huge pushback from the tech sector last week when the news emerged, DSIT was split up by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham this week. Much of it has been sent back to previous homes in the Business and Culture departments.

The bright spot, as far as the industry is concerned, is the elevation of Narayan to Cabinet as Minister of State for AI. On calls this week, he and new Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds emphasised that AI remains a priority. “A bigger, joined-up department with more clout will help drive decisions and remove obstacles to innovation and prosperity,” read a statement from the newly christened DBIST.

What to make of it all? There’s a gloomy view of this history, in which several of DSIT’s achievements look less impressive. It passed no AI Act. The Sovereign AI Fund writes cheques which are a drop in the ocean for startups well-funded by American capital. The department never quite had a coherent mission and the combination of briefs like online safety with frontier AI sometimes seemed contradictory. It could not escape the bureaucracy of Whitehall.

But there’s also an optimistic idea of its legacy. The AI Safety Summit kicked off a series of global events that have continued to bring together tech and world leaders, the next one due to take place in Switzerland in 2027. AISI is recognised as the leading organisation of its type, spawning equivalents around the world and often being among the first to get access to new models for testing. Top talent continues to be attracted to SovAI and ARIA.

“It was simultaneously the best and most painful job I’ve ever had,” says Harris. Seeing how the sausage got made could be dispiriting, but when things worked, it was possible to have a big impact.

Perhaps the legacy of DSIT will be made or lost in whether the machinery of government can repeat its occasional magic tricks of empowering capable people to deliver projects quickly. Speed can hardly be expected in the middle of a major reorganisation, but there isn’t really another option when technology itself is moving so fast.

And then there’s the matter of the tech industry. When reports of DSIT’s closure began swirling, I was put in mind of the rumours of an Exit Tax ahead of last year’s Budget. The policy was eventually ruled out, but it amplified a feeling among entrepreneurs that they didn’t have a champion – a feeling I’ve previously argued coalesced around a burst of enthusiasm for the idea of getting Clifford into political office.

Part of the fun of the early days of DSIT, says Morris, came from “the reflected excitement of the stakeholders that they’d got this department that was going to be focusing on their issues, was staffed with experts”. Without that singularity of focus, will tech founders and top scientists feel like they have a portion of government that looks out for their interest?

Much is still to be determined. Just as I was about to send this email, the Cabinet Office announced that the now-Lord Patrick Vallance will chair the PM’s new AI taskforce – again modelled on the vaccine taskforce. Here we go again.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🖥️ Computer Weekly editor Brian Glick says it’s “difficult to conclude anything other than Burnham has significantly downgraded the importance of technology in his government”. I’ve cited some facts reported in this piece as part of this history, but it’s worth also reading the full analysis.

🇬🇧 Just before the DSIT dissolution was confirmed, and published their ideas for Andy Burnham’s sovereign AI policy.

🚄 has been all over this story. Check out his breakdown of it and this list of all the different DSIT responsibilities.

🍦 In other news, our next Founder-Writer Collective event is on the 20th of August. Sign up here.

✅ Correction: This post updated on 24th July to amend James Wise’s name. I had previously referred to him as James Balderton. Please forgive my jetlagged brain pulling a “Tim Apple” on me.

Palantir’s chore coat was the nadir of a battle for attention, in which tech companies produce a physical object to demonstrate their real-ness in the world – and then that object gets refracted back into fresh attention the online space. Palantir’s vibes chief Eliano Younes told Pirate Wires this week that tens of thousands of people are buying its merch. But the impressions on posts about it can go into the millions.

Also this week, OpenAI dropped some new items on Supply Co., its swag store. They were heralded with an editorial-style photoshoot that pictured the items against an olive green background. But the reaction was mocking. Why, dunkers asked, bother dressing up this basic corporate merch as though it’s a lifestyle marker?

Well, because that’s the game now. You can’t just order a box of cheap T-shirts and call it a day. There has to be something more.

Companies distributing logo-adorned items are nothing so novel, of course. They are as old as the advertising industry itself. But there’s something in the air lately as so many fast-growing AI businesses find themselves competing for oxygen in a noisy field.

“You could argue there’s a short period of time where a company’s brand has a cult impact,” says Conor McKenna, CEO and co-founder of Go Swag. “It usually applies to high-growth tech firms. And in those situations, people want to be part of that club.”

McKenna’s company is a merch-maker to well-funded, buzzy names on the European tech scene like ElevenLabs, Lovable, and Black Forest Labs. It also serves big guys like Meta and more traditional corporate clients like Knight Frank. Go Swag itself is based in Glasgow, where McKenna and his co-founder Ben Greenock launched the company in 2019.

He agrees that there has been a shift in startup swag over the last few years, at least among the kinds of companies Go Swag works with. Those firms, he says, are now looking to high-end brands with street appeal, like Supreme and Balenciaga, as inspiration.

As a lapsed fashion fan, I can see what he means. Tech companies are exploring everything that luxury brands already went through as they adjusted to the online age. Some pursued a flight to quality and production credentials – just as Palantir has done by manufacturing its chore jacket in America, no easy feat. Others pushed to see how far the logo could go; what is a $70 ChatGPT basketball if not the new iteration of the Chanel surfboard?

Perhaps the biggest shift the fashion industry had to adjust to was the permanent casual Friday on which the world embarked sometime in the noughties. As dressing down became the norm, consumers needed ways to dress up their seemingly laid-back looks. This was where desirable streetwear brands thrived.

Indeed, a well-done bit of branded kit can have much the same effect as one of those brands in that it generates word-of-mouth marketing and a distinct sense of FOMO.

That’s why when OpenAI opened its employee-only merch store to the public a few months ago, there was so much interest despite the relative basicness of most of the items, because now you could get an insight into what insiders were buying. It was like an LA-only brand finally opened a shop in your city. OpenAI even left up an archive of items that had previously been for sale when it was a closed site, so that you could see what you had missed out on. Some people are even going out of their way to access rarer items: Anna Tong reported for Forbes this week that the secondary market for employee-only swag from OpenAI and Anthropic is thriving.

We’ve also seen how these products can play a central role in IRL events that then have a secondary impact online, like when Anthropic hosted pop-ups in New York and London giving away limited-run ‘Thinking’ caps. Go Swag has been working on more ideas like this lately helping set up vending machines dispensing company swag across Meta’s London campus, and working on the ElevenLabs pop-up for New York Tech Week in which a robot served coffee and visitors could haggle with an AI agent to buy swag.

But McKenna is careful to point out that the company steers clear of gimmicks. Everybody (including me) tends to ask him about the weirdest merch item he’s ever been asked to make, but the answer is not very exciting, he says, because they just focus on doing the basics well.

Only by making things people will actually use, he argues, can companies avoid huge waste.

“It’s a 100-plus-year industry, and most of that time, unfortunately, has been filled with stress balls and t-shirts that disintegrate in the wash,” he says. “And people are just fed up of it. It’s not what people want anymore. It’s embarrassing and it’s so wasteful.”

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The quality is one part of that, but so is the delivery method. Go Swag uses online forms to ensure that when companies want to give their staff some new swag, the recipients can choose from a range of options. This also helps tackle one of the merch industrial complex’s biggest issues (and certainly one I’ve encountered) which is the tendency to only offer unisex sizes, i.e. essentially men’s.

In May, Go Swag raised a fresh $5m in funding. That will go towards US expansion efforts, hiring more people (“we’re hiring everyone and their granny it feels like, right now”) and advancing its own AI technology, which is used for things like smart recommendations.

Given the hype around merch drops lately, as well as the success of his own company, I ask McKenna if he thinks we’re in something of a startup swag boom.

He points out that branded products have never really gone away, the industry just evolved. “It changed and is changing,” he says “And people, I think, are catching up.” Catching up on the idea that things should be better-made, and better-tailored to what people want.

But he acknowledges the hype of this particular era, and notes that “brands, more than ever, are becoming social clubs”.

May the best swag win.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🖥️ It was interesting to see the Financial Times write up a splashy piece about tech fellowship ‘tours of duty’ in the UK government. I’ve covered these schemes previously but also noted how they have to tread a careful line in terms of public attention.

👓 Sir has launched a Substack. Welcome! In his first piece, he called for “public policy that promotes innovation while also incentivising responsibility and security, fosters international collaboration on key safety issues, and encourages careful consideration of how AI is deployed for the benefit of society”.

⛰️ Infrastructure advisers at Future Works are proposing building a tunnel under the Peak District. They say Norwegian techniques could drastically reduce the cost.

🏰 AI startup Voyage just released a launch video filmed in the English countryside.

🏦 Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, has been talking about AI a lot this week, calling for better global coordination to tackle risks.

💂 Valarian has raised a $50m series A to support its effort to become the British answer to Palantir. “This idea that we can’t build stuff in the UK really annoys me,” co-founder Max Buchan told Pathfounders.

🌦️ Some London office updates: Tapestry VC is opening its first office in the capital after raising a new $80m fund; and Dutch software investor Main Capital Partners is also planning its first UK office.

🔋 Deep Tech London is happening in October! Details are online now.

Everyone has a different way of explaining the work of Ethos, a London-based AI company that recently raised almost $23m from investors including a16z and General Catalyst. So much so that it causes some confusion.

It has been described by TechCrunch as an AI-enhanced expert network along the lines of GLG and Third Bridge; in Tech Funding News as a replacement for CVs. a16z investor Anish Acharya says it “unbundles expertise from work”. Another backer, Sarah Drinkwater, calls it “wildly optimistic AI infrastructure focused on human flourishing”. The occasional disgruntled Reddit user can be less enthusiastic, wondering if it’s a waste of time.

“I think the confusion roots in the fact that the world currently thinks of each type of economic opportunity as a vertical, and that we just need to build these vertical AI companies for each of them,” says James Lo, who leads the company as CEO. His co-founder, Daniel J. Mankowitz, is CTO.

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So as soon as I sat down with Lo at the Ethos office in King’s Cross, I asked him to clear up that confusion and tell me what the company does in its own words.

“We want to match people to economic opportunities with AI,” he said. A straightforward enough description, but it still warrants some further explanation of the practicalities.

Individuals create profiles with Ethos, then speak to an AI voice agent which in turn builds a “living AI profile” to reflect the person’s specific experiences and knowledge areas.

From there, Ethos matches candidates to opportunities available on the platform right now. These tend to be the kinds of tasks for which companies like hedge funds, management consultants and AI labs that require input from a high level of human expertise.

If you’ve been job-hunting on LinkedIn during the past year or so, you’ve probably seen Ethos – as well as Mercor and other brands – appearing with frequency on the available jobs tab. They aren’t jobs in the traditional sense, but tasks and contracts, often with high hourly rates.

This kind of work has been called becoming “grist for the AI mill”, but Lo sees it differently.

In the future, he says, we’ll wonder at the idea that we ever relied on credentials. “Isn’t it obvious that every person would have a personal AI that can deeply understand who we are, what we’ve done, what our aspirations are and and also what our latent potential actually is?”

It’s an optimistic vision of the future of work at a time when a lot of people are feeling less than optimistic about the jobs market. Indeed, Lo looks at AI as something that can actually make opportunity more abundant.

He draws on some of his experience as a McKinsey consultant, when he worked on a charity project offering training courses to unemployed youth. As part of the research, he visited job centres – “incredibly depressing places” – and saw the limitations of the system.

He’d like to see AI profiles used to create a “refined experience for job centres where anybody of any background can walk in and have this tailored experience that understands who they are and then bridges them to opportunity immediately”.

He acknowledges that helping people into work is harder than it looks, in part because it rests on a question of motivation. But “the idea of just making it more pleasant, I think, would be a good start”.

Right now on Ethos, top earners are currently making $10,000 a month, per the platform’s own figures. But Lo says this is only scratching the surface. “For every expert who is earning on the platform, there’s roughly a thousand more that are getting rejected or don’t have a matching opportunity yet.”

A big part of the team’s focus is on diversifying what opportunities are available, but also on exploring what else the platform could be useful for. Could it, for example, help budding career-switchers figure out their next move by drawing on data about people who’ve made similar lateral moves? A recently added feature attempts to do that by showing users “pathways” others have taken, based on aggregate data.

As Ethos looks to make better use of its data, though, the business has to tread a careful line. Who owns the expertise of its users?

“In our view, we need to give the users even more control over exactly what they surface to clients and what they can delete,” Lo explains. The team has been hard at work on a “massive privacy policy revamp”.

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Previous versions of the company’s terms of service gave participants zero control over or even access to the transcripts of their own calls with the AI agent, and gave Ethos or its clients ownership over that information, to do what they wanted with it. A VC even pointed out the clause on X during the recent, otherwise laudatory reaction to Ethos’s fundraising in May. But if you look at the terms of service today, you’ll see they’ve completely changed. Ownership now remains with the user, who now agrees instead to license their expertise.

“We changed it all so that it’s very explicit that the experts own the transcripts. So this is your data, these are your assets, and we’re helping you license those assets to clients.” There’s also a lot of work that goes into compliance, “sanitising” transcripts to ensure users don’t inadvertantly give out personal or commercially sensitive information.

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Where some founders might try to hammer home their mission, shouting louder than their critics, Lo often appears to have thought through the concerns or the ways its mission might be misunderstood. This probably stems, again, from the challenges of articulating a business that is based on grand ideas about the future economy.

That same confusion I came in with is something he’s even dealt with when raising money from VCs. “Whenever we talk to VCs, it’s instantly obvious whether they’re gonna classify us into some vertical or whether they fully understand the vision.”

The investors they clicked best with were the ones willing to engage with that vision. “When I first met Jeanette [zu Furstenburg] at General Catalyst, we spoke about the European renaissance [...], we were literally talking about if we were to start a second Renaissance, that’s like global in nature, rooted in Europe, what would that actually look like?”

This gets to another part of the mission, which is to build a hugely valuable company from Europe. Making a layer that matches every person to their economic opportunity would be such a company, Lo says, explicitly positioning it as non-American answer to LinkedIn, but better. Europe in general, he says, has “underpriced talent in every industry”.

Of course, the latest round was led by a16z. In fact many of the biggest funding rounds for UK startups this year have been led by US funds – including those, like Ethos, which have been dubbed part of the ‘DeepMind Mafia’. But Lo isn’t sure that’s a problem. Inevitably, we wade into the sovereignty debate.

“Sovereignty is actually about national leverage,” Lo says. “Like, does your country produce something of value, enough that the world depends on it?”

It therefore doesn’t matter where UK companies get their funding from, he argues, it just matters where they are “building products that are critical to the world”.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🖊️ Liz Kendall has made her debut on Substack. Welcome to the fray, Liz! She’s written about sovereign AI and the two years the UK has to secure its place in the pecking order.

🎤 Over on SoWhat magazine, I experienced the terrifying prospect of going through something I ask people to do for me every day: being interviewed! You can read the results here.

🎞️ There was a piece in The Times about Intelligence Rising, the documentary featuring Faculty’s Marc Warner that I saw at SXSW London.

Short links today because I’m technically on holiday (if such a thing exists for freelancers). See you next week!

It’s funny to think that plans for the site date back to when it was acquired in 2013, a year before Google acquired DeepMind. These days, the AI lab is so central to the tech company’s strategy that the building has been named in honour of one of its notable achievements. The building is named Platform 37, a reference to the 37th move with which AlphaGo defeated champion Go player Leed Sedol in 2016.

DeepMind’s influence goes well beyond a single building. As Tim Bradshaw wrote in the Financial Times this week, many credit Demis Hassabis’s resistance to moving the company stateside as the reason London now has such a thriving AI scene – and as a big factor in the King’s Cross revival.

That Google had already committed to the site before it bought DeepMind puts a slight wrinkle in this narrative. Indeed, the development of King’s Cross had been initiated in the noughties, and it was the completion of HS1 that arguably had the biggest impact on the area.

What we can say is that, for the AI era, Google DeepMind has become the centre of gravity. It pulls other companies and hopeful founders closer to a redeveloped King’s Cross that has been in the making for 20 years.

When I visited the Ethos AI offices last month (my full interview with co-founder James Lo should be up next week), I found a small team eating lunch together in a bright corner office with large windows. On one side they could see the station, and Platform 37 beyond it. On the other, they had a view of the converted Victorian warehouses into which OpenAI is due to move next year.

“All the talent is here – DeepMind, Meta, everybody’s here,” Lo said when I asked him why they’d chosen the location. “All the startups are here.” Lo’s co-founder, Daniel J. Mankowitz, was previously a research scientist at DeepMind and so could be called part of the DeepMind Diaspora1.

And the area is ready for them. As the number of startups looking for proximity has increased, so the office market has evolved to meet their needs.

A few weeks ago, I spent a few hours checking out offices around the area with Anna Mears and Gareth Smith from Rubberdesk, an online marketplace and broker platform for flexible office spaces.

Smith, who has been in the industry since 2010, told me there are now far more serviced operators now than there were a decade ago. Also known as “turnkey”, these are the kinds of offices where amenities like kitchens, cleaning, and Wi-Fi are all included. They often make the most sense for startups because it’s easy to hop from hotdesking to private office to an entire floor.

We began over at Halkin, a premium flexible workspace at the Mainframe, a former railway company headquarters that faces Euston station.

I get a bit of flack whenever I use the term “the Knowledge Quarter”, but I like it. True, it does have an engineered ring to it. The name officially refers to the consortium of organisations, including the Francis Crick Institute, UAL, Google, and several others, that have clubbed together to promote the area.

The reason I use it is simply that it better encompasses the sense of this place as an entire quarter, not a single station and its surroundings. To the west, Synthesia’s offices are almost at Regent’s Park. To the north, you’ll find the autonomous cars of Wayve Technologies parked up in their vast warehouse headquarters, far down the York Road.

Halkin at the Mainframe is a good example of the tech offices creeping further out from the epicentre of Granary Square, Coal Drops Yard, and the surrounding offices. That spread now goes in both directions, Smith said.

“Shoreditch is now almost the overflow for King’s Cross, whereas King’s Cross used to be an overflow for Shoreditch. It’s really flipped on its head.”

Inside the building, there are plush sofas, a parquet floor, low coffee tables with miniature sculptures. We’re not in WeWork any more.

Mears told me that there’s something of a “race to premium” going on in the City of London and you can see it around King’s Cross too. In offices, much like gyms, there always seems to be room to go more and more upscale.

There’s demand for mid-market spaces too, Mears and Smith told me, but there’s very little interest in bargain basement offices any more. “People would rather work from home than go into somewhere that has no facilities, that has no gym or bike racks or showers,” Smith said.

Next we walked over to the Lighthouse Building. You’ll know the one. As soon as you come out of King’s Cross station, you can see the triangular building jutting into traffic like the prow of a ship, a grey lighthouse on its roof.

The building dates back to 1875, and though it’s modernised inside, you can still see the quirks of the old structure. The tower under the lighthouse gives some occupants quirky little turret-like meeting rooms. One office, currently empty, has no windows onto the street, only skylights.

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It illustrates the reality of the rush for space in this area. Though there has been a tremendous amount of development, not everything can be newbuild. But the converted storehouses and oyster bars and stables are part of what people like about the quarter.

Something else that’s changed in the last few years: events spaces. In part because more teams are hybrid, but also because of the buzzy calendar of tech events going on in the capital, many startups are now looking for an office where they’re able to host get-togethers. And there’s something of a status element too.

“For a lot of startups, that prestige of having an N1 postcode carries a lot of kudos,” said Smith.

Of course, London is a well-connected place. The Elizabeth Line, Smith and Mears told me, has completely changed the game. Your base can be almost anywhere – even Canary Wharf – and you can be in another part of the metropolis in half an hour.

But there’s still an irresistible pull to being in the place where you feel like everything is happening. And for this era, that place is undoubtedly King’s Cross.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🇪🇺 It looks less likely now that the EU’s Scaleup Europe fund will be able to invest in British companies. Mike Butcher has a good overview on Pathfounders and Dom Hallas of the StartUp Coalition explained some of the background from the UK side here. On one hand, of course it makes sense for EU countries to be worried about cash being poured into a non-EU state. On the other, that means the rest of Europe will miss out on its biggest AI hub – including many companies founded by EU citizens.

💭 Speaking of DeepMind, this longread profile of the company’s in-house philosopher Iason Gabriel by Robert P. Baird in the Guardian is worth a read.

💾 Lots of chat about Burnham’s potential about-face on AI strategy this week. I’ll be on the Pathfounders podcast shortly to discuss.

❗ Marked as Urgent, a series of discussions about online governance, is back with a session about the UK’s under-16s social media ban. It’s not until the 17th of September though, so there’s still time for a policy U-turn!

🤳🏼 Political fancam creator extraordinaire Ellen Stewart wrote about how the next general election will be won on vibes for Labourlist.

Amid an attention crisis that is pushing reading rates ever lower, ’s The Anxious Generation has become a totem for parents and policymakers alike, and has now set off a domino effect of social media bans for children around the world.

Yet the author of that very book admitted earlier this year that he himself hardly reads these days.

“We adults, we’re all overwhelmed,” Haidt told the Hard Fork podcast in January. “I’m overwhelmed. I can’t read a book anymore. There’s too much other stuff coming in.”

When Australia became the first nation to raise the ‘digital age of consent’ to 16 earlier this year, the policy had a clear lineage. Annabel West, the wife of South Australia Premier Peter Malinauskas, had urged him to act after reading Haidt’s bestseller.

The book makes a simple argument: that the rise of smartphones and social media usage among teens has been the primary culprit for plummeting mental health. It makes four core recommendations: no smartphones before high school (age 14), no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independence and responsibility in the real world.

Following Australia’s lead, Britain is now planning to introduce a ban on social media for under-16s. Several questions remain on how it will work, but with cross-party support, it seems likely to face little opposition on its way into law.

Dozens of other countries are also barrelling towards much tighter restrictions on social media for children. Haidt’s influence in all of this is well-documented. In January, leadership hopeful Wes Streeting invited him to address an event and the two then also met in February. The former health secretary later proclaimed that social media should be treated like tobacco.

Haidt has also lent his support to British grassroots parent groups like Smartphone Free Childhood and he has submitted evidence to the House of Commons.

The author’s willingness to segue from researcher to activist has helped, but still: it seems fair to say that The Anxious Generation may well be the most influential book on government policies since the 1960s, when titles like Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed could effect huge shifts in politics and public opinion.

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Of course, part of why the book was so successful in the first place was that it gave readers data to understand something they had already observed.

As I have argued before, the ban reflects a desire to fix several things we think have gone wrong in the past decade or more with society as a whole, not just children. Adults, including Haidt himself, have lost control of our relationships with digital products. Streeting, too, said his concentration span has suffered due to doom-scrolling. We do not know how to get back on top of our phone habits, so we are trying to hit the reset button on under-16s1.

Grown-ups having experience of the problem first-hand, Haidt acknowledged on that same podcast interview, is part of “why we’re winning” and why it’s “so easy to get laws to protect kids all over the world”.

So are we doing this because it’s going to work, or because it’s easy?

Part of the problem is that we haven’t precisely defined what it would mean for the ban to “work”.

On Monday, the Prime Minister took to Substack to explain the thinking behind the new policy.

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He identified all the greatest hits of concerns about social media: time lost to scrolling, cyberbullying by peers, messages from strangers, the impact on mental health.

Will the new rules tackle all of these? As many have pointed out, the exemptions from the ban, such as Whatsapp, mean it likely won’t put a stop to cyberbullying. As for the disruptive effect on attention, one can easily swap scrolling for gaming.

Politicians like the idea of a social media ban because, like screening Adolescence in schools, it looks dramatic and decisive, without proof that it is going to work. Even worse, there is a possibility that rules like these come in without a clear idea of how we are going to measure whether they are effective.

Haidt himself began by focusing on the mental health of adolescents. But by becoming involved in advocacy, he too has come to see social media as a shibboleth for all kinds of ills.

On Hard Fork, Haidt pre-emptively shifted the goalposts for scoring the success of Australia’s ban.

“This whole debate has been framed around mental health. And if it doesn’t improve mental health, does that mean we should undo it? I would say no. I would say: Tell me how many kids have been sextorted. Tell me how many kids have died from drug overdose deaths. Let’s look at all the other ancillary harms, and then we can decide whether it was a good policy.”

Despite this, I think Haidt has a clearer view on this topic than many of those inspired by him. When I read The Anxious Generation and found myself more convinced than I had been that things could not go on like this.

But I was also surprised by how little I hear the rest of his argument discussed. It makes me wonder how many people have read the whole book – or whether they are only remembering the bits they want to hear.

Going back to the four pillars recommended in The Anxious Generation, the focus has been on the rules-based actions such as keeping phones out of schools and keeping children off social media, with very little about encouraging more independence and free play. This is not just a social norms issue – Haidt points to many cases of parents facing legal consequences for attempting to allow their child to do something without supervision.

Haidt is quite clear that children and teenagers need risk and discomfort, as well as a sense of autonomy, in order to develop. Removing online risks without allowing a corresponding increase in independence offline is only going halfway to a solution. Taking away phones has to be coupled with allowing kids to do something else. What is the vision for how to create those alternatives?

Whether you accept Haidt’s thesis or not – and there are plenty of critiques out there of his methodology – I’d recommend reading the book. It’s worth understanding the argument in its entirety. Even if you want only to argue against it more effectively.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🍴Speaking of Hard Fork, co-hosts and have announced they are leaving The New York Times to go it alone and launch their own podcast. I’m excited to see where this goes – there’s a Substack to subscribe to here if you want to see updates.

🔒 I didn’t get into all the implications for online privacy in this piece, but has a great write-up on Project Glitch.

📍As I wrote about last month, the augmented planning tools made by Google and Faculty are now being tested across several councils. In a blog post, Faculty confirmed it would be rolled out nationally from 2027.

🦋 For The New Statesman, I wrote about what the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 restrictions mean for Britain.

✍️ We had a great time at the Founder-Writer Collective on Tuesday! Kirsty Cooke wrote a round-up of some of her favourite takeaways. I won’t be around for the next one but Eleanor is hard at work arranging it. Follow the calendar and stay tuned for updates.

Ben Peters should know. It’s been his mission since 2023 to untangle some of the most complex systems of work imaginable: utilities, factories, facilities management, logistics. Cogna, which he co-founded after selling his previous startup to Bosch, builds custom AI software for critical workflows across those industries, working with customers like Ocado, Tropicana, and Cadent Gas.

His LinkedIn bio declares that Peters is “solving the productivity problem”. But in his view, that goal doesn’t necessarily mean replacing jobs.

“People are massively ambidextrous,” he says. Decisions are made by weighing up calculations of resources, constraints, opportunities and applying judgment. “It’s not like you can just open ChatGPT and it’s going to solve it for you.”

This week, Cogna published a report identifying “an enormous black hole of squandered resource at the centre of UK industry”. As part of research into whether AI can solve the UK’s productivity crisis, respondents reported losing at least 30% of their time each week to manual, low-value work. Meanwhile 70% of workers say they often have to wait for approvals to do their jobs, slowing down workflows. Skilled employees are “forced into the role of idle bystanders at work rather than active participants”.

“We need technology that amplifies human ingenuity, rather than hindering it,” Peters writes.

Reducing this busywork and admin delay is part of what he says he’s trying to do with Cogna. Teams design applications that join up systems where companies have historically relied on manual coordination and other slow workflows, handling everything from gas escape management to blending fruit juice.

But he sees this as a bigger opportunity on an economic level. “There are three core ingredients to productivity – or more broadly growth on a macro level,” he tells me. “You’ve got labour costs, energy costs, and cost of capital. And the UK is not doing great on any of those, frankly.”

“The opportunity for us, in AI, is that it touches all three.”

Peters seems to care deeply about making things better, including making things better in Britain. But at the same time he is a realist, wary of puffing up the UK tech sector when it still faces many challenges. This all makes him a good interviewee: willing to weigh in on a range of subjects and speak plainly about them, a facet that is surprisingly rare in CEOs.

We first spoke almost exactly a year ago. It was during the previous London Tech Week, when Jensen Huang appeared on stage to admonish the UK’s lack of AI infrastructure. I was put in touch with Peters because he had a slightly different take: the UK was a “scrappy startup” nation and not a “heavy roller”. It could never be sovereign in the way the compute salesmen seemed to promise, and should instead bet on where it would see the best returns.

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He feels similarly today, describing the conversation around sovereignty as “a bit of a confusion and distraction”, with a bit of “political posturing” thrown in. It’s not that there are no opportunities in infrastructure buildout, but that everything always comes back to energy. He suggests having a national mission, an “energy, energy, energy” successor to Tony Blair’s “education, education, education”. If energy costs can be addressed, then the other pieces will follow.

With its main office in London, Cogna now has about 80 employees, having recently been on a hiring tear. Peters estimates that half his time is just spent hiring. In the last couple of months alone, the business has announced the appointment of a new manager for strategic industries, a new chief of staff, and a new CTO. Being flexible about hiring across locations – including the Bay Area, Seattle, and Zurich – has allowed the company to scoop up some great talent, Peters says, though he’s also pleased that there’s so much here in the UK.

“All this talent is aggregating in London. We’ve got to use that as an opportunity to peel some of it off into actually British companies that are going to work for British industry.”

He isn’t too worried about the big AI labs making it harder to hire by driving up salary, though. “Even though you’ve got more businesses paying huge salaries, you can still find people that are more mission-driven than purely cash-driven.”

Indeed, this is part of the pitch when hiring. “It’s a huge part of why people join us, is the mission. To have that impact.” There’s the chance to improve productivity in critical industries like gas and water, but he also teases that in the future there could also be something built more directly for the public good.

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It isn’t something the business would do right now because public sector procurement cycles are too long (that’s another thing he thinks there needs to be a national imperative around fixing), but as it gets bigger “we will definitely be building our public sector-facing business”. He won’t say much beyond that, other than that this has been part of the plan since day one.

“There’s just so much to be done there, there’s so much impact you can have. I feel like that’s a target-rich space for us.”

This pull towards purpose-driven businesses folds into that palpable strain of tech culture at the moment that calls on its citizens to do things that matter – an explicit contrast to the companies engaged in what calls “vice signalling”, or the “grindslop” identified by .

I ask Peters if he’s noticed an uptick in people who want to do something meaningful, especially the kinds of people in the UK who want to use their talents to help fix the failings of government and public services. Is it an upswell of altruism? The vibecoding revolution? A Dominic Cummings effect?

It’s always been there, he says, but he agrees it’s more noticeable recently. His diagnosis of why is a little starker than mine.

“Smart people can see that we’re fucked.”

And as highly qualified technical people do, they start to think about ways to fix it.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🚘 Wayve is considering selling a stake on the UK’s new private market, Bloomberg reports. If it goes ahead, this would give the fledgling Pisces system a good test drive.

✍️ We are already very oversubscribed for next week’s first event for the Founder-Writer Collective, but you can subscribe to the Luma calendar for updates on our future plans.

🇪🇺 The grim outlook of Europe 2031, a new thesis about what happens if Europe misses the boat on AI, has generated a lot of discussion on my timeline. I’m interested in the ambiguous position the UK plays in the scenario – pulling ahead due to the strength of its AI scene, institutions like AISI, and independence from the EU, but still beholden to the major powers. The report’s authors argue that the UK should be part of a middle-powers coalition to keep some leverage over the AI supply chain.

📊 Michael P. Gibson (co-founder of the Thiel Fellowship) argues in The Spectator that swathes of Westminster have succumbed to Palantir Derangement Syndrome. Thoughts?

🏁 Messaging app Signal is pushing back on the UK government’s attempts to clamp down on children seeing nudity, which the company says amounts to “invisible surveillance infrastructure”. CEO Meredith Whittaker says the company may even pull services from the UK.

👍 wrote a thoughtful meditation on what the currency of likability might look like in a post-abundance world.

🎙️ “My bet is that widespread recording simply happens, because it’s too hard to stop, and the controls get retrofitted on top.” A16z GP David Haber writes about how one of the biggest taboos of the workplace evaporated.

💰 I was at Stripe Tour on Wednesday to see the fireside with Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo. Between discussing his poker-playing AI agent and pricing psychology, he spoke about how the UK still isn’t taking enough risks. I did a quick write-up of those points on my LinkedIn page and the full interview with John Collison is here.

🍻 If you’re looking for something to do tonight, there’s a SoTA pub meet-up.

Walking around the Truman Brewery this week, hot pink splashed across its bare walls, I had a sense of déjà vu.

This was the second edition of SXSW London, and the second time I’ve attended. Unlike other business events, it eschews the Excel Centre and the Olympia to embed itself across several sites in Shoreditch. While that creates some logistical challenges (good luck if you suddenly realise you’re meant to be at Shoreditch Town Hall), it makes the week far more distinctive.

This was especially fun last year, when the sun was out almost every day and one could enjoy the open yards of the Truman brewery. Less so in 2026, with its moody on-again, off-again showers. Nevertheless, I enjoyed traversing the event and wanted to put together some of my highlights in the form of vignettes. Let me know how you like this style.

Warner’s wargame

“If we froze the technology today, I think we would get lots and lots of benefits, some downsides, and it would be very likely to be [analagous] to the technology that we’re used to historically. To me, the danger is in pushing forward that frontier.”

Not, perhaps, what you expect a tech entrepreneur turned S&P 100 CTO to say about AI. But as stormy weather raged outside the open windows of Shoreditch’s Rich Mix cinema, that was what Faculty founder Marc Warner told a small group of us.

We had just seen the premiere screening of Intelligence Rising, a documentary film about a war game Warner ran back in 2024. Players included the physicist Stephen Hsu, Skype founder and investor Jaan Tallinn, the author Yuval Noah Harari, and retired US Army general Stan McChrystal. Groups represented the US, China, the EU, the UK, the tech sector, and civil society. Through diplomacy and strategising, they had to work out how to respond to challenges such as a pandemic, cyberattacks, and the prospect of AGI.

I asked Warner if it was realistic that the UK would even have a seat at the table in negotiations like these. He noted that when the film was made, Britain had only recently convened the 2023 Bletchley Park Summit and set up the AISI. During the game ‘summits’, UK team leader Lord Mark Sedwill tended to take on the chairman role.

“I think you can think of the UK as standing in for whoever that convening role might be,” Warner said. Switzerland, for example, is hosting the next Global AI Summit in 2027. But while other states might sometimes occupy that space, the UK is “probably the third power” in AI, he said, so likely to remain involved in some way.

Intelligence Rising consists largely of footage from the wargame, including Warner observing from another room full of screens, like some sort of benign Saw set-up. Players speed-run a series of imagined events over several years, into the 2030s.

Interspersed with this is footage of Warner at home with his family, including a baby son. He speaks about his fears for the future and why he’s so concerned about making it go well. Originally, this was not part of the plan for the film: it was to be focused only on the war game. But director Elena Andreicheva (an old university friend of Warner’s and an Oscar-winner to boot) wanted to add a more personal strand, as well as give the viewer a break from the intensity of the negotiations.

I am no film critic (and after attempting to write notes in the dark during the screening, I have an even greater respect for that profession) but I thought this structure worked well. The only thing that was missing was much background about who Warner was, beyond a brief introduction at the start, and there was even less about what Faculty does.

In this way, the film was very different from the likes of The Thinking Game, a documentary about Demis Hassabis and DeepMind. Instead of trying to introduce the public to a specific founder and company, the documentarians focused on unfurling the real-world effects. I won’t spoil the ending, but to me it felt like both Warner and the filmmakers wanted the audience to leave with serious concerns about AI safety.

Rooftop-hopping

Every time I told someone I was heading to a Zoom drinks later, they looked at me with horror and seemed to be experiencing a Covid flashback.

“What, online?”

Thankfully, no. These were drinks hosted by the actual company Zoom. On a hotel rooftop (with plenty of shelter in case of rain), I met execs including Alex Shumway-Jones, who has just been appointed head of EMEA and is in the process of moving from Texas to London.

Louise Newbury-Smith, head of UK & Ireland, spoke briefly about the company’s investment in the UK – which includes a data centre for regulated industries that want to ensure their data is held domestically. It will be interesting to see how many other companies follow suit.

Rooftop parties are always a gamble. Thankfully at drinks hosted by Milltown Partners on Thursday, there was plenty of room inside, where I mostly gossiped with comms pros and fellow journalists. I wore a badge displaying my name and the name of this newsletter. This was very helpful for promoting the brand, up until someone asked if UK 2.0 was some sort of Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting campaign. Rebrand incoming.

Writers in a time of AI

Sipping free lattes from the LinkedIn stand, and I finally met in person on Wednesday. In case you don’t know Eleanor, she writes the fantastic newsletter about AI, creativity and writing here on Substack, and is also managing editor at Every. Our circles and interests have overlapped for so long, that it was no real surprise that within about 10 minutes of meeting we had hatched a plan. As there seems to be so much appetite for a space where technology and writing can overlap in London, we’re starting The Founder-writer Collective. We’ll be having a small event on 16 June to kick things off. Save the date and I’ll share more details soon.

Eleanor also chaired a roundtable about AI and writing that day which I sat in on. The discussion quickly landed on a happy medium, in which people who write for a living – in comms, technical writing, social media, etc. – want to protect the parts of the work they love, but find ways to hand off the parts they don’t.

The most interesting takeaway to me was the role of SXSW London itself. One participant said they hadn’t been using AI at all in their work until last year’s festival, after which they felt they had to get started – and are now happy they did. Another, attending for the first time, said their anti-AI sentiments were becoming more nuanced as the week progressed.

This reflects, to me, how this particular event prioritises the creative industries. While it’s true that the programme could stand to gain a few more heavy hitters from the AI industry, those bosses aren’t always the ones people want to hear from. If you’re in a corporate-creative job – marketing, advertising, media, design – you’d probably rather hear from people in your own industry, talking about its future, than from a tech mogul making grand predictions about UBI and robotics.

In other words, there’s something valuable in meeting and hearing from non-AI people, who evidently care about creative work and want it to continue, but who are making AI work for them.

Sovereign-ish

As I covered in a full write-up for The Morning Intelligence this morning, George Osborne talked about his new role at OpenAI, where he is head of OpenAI for Countries.

Part of that job entails lots of conversations about AI sovereignty, but he freely admitted that only the US and China have any chance of building a fully sovereign stack – and even they aren’t there yet.

Instead, he talked about how countries could compete in one part of the stack, or even see “sovereignty” in different terms altogether.

“There’s a different kind of sovereignty which comes from having a kind of sufficient ecosystem of businesses,” Osborne told the crowd, suggesting that the audience at the conference was evidence of that in itself. Even the new European Headquarters of OpenAI, which are set to be located in King’s Cross, could be seen as a “form of sovereignty in the UK”.

It’s all well and good to talk up a country’s strengths, but not everything has to be somehow be seen as “sovereignty”. Maybe time to retire the buzzword?

Nostalgia/New

There was a bittersweet note to my déjà vu. This time last year, I was running around the talks with my Digital Frontier co-workers. The festival was a backdrop for some happy memories, which turned out to be some of our last together as colleagues before DF ceased publication that July.

Still, I was cheered by the thought of new projects and new ideas. My ex-colleagues have since scattered and many of us are building new things – from newsletters like Utopia in Beta and The Moronic Inferno to shows like , as well as new media outlets like Pathfounders and . I guess this is a vindication of my argument last month that big ideas beget more big ideas. Who knows what will exist this time next year?

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

📰 On that note, if you’d like to fund your local solo media start-ups, Tom Bristow and I are collaborating on a joint sponsorship package across The Morning Intelligence and UK 2.0. Fill in the form here to find out more.

🦘 Cambridge Enterprise, which I wrote about in my piece on spin-outs a few months ago, has launched something called the “London Leap” for its deeptech founders. It will help Cambridge-based companies embed themselves in the London tech scene, with support from Phoenix Court, Balderton Capital and BioInnovation Institute Foundation.

🤖 For Unherd, I wrote about why there’s skepticism that robots of the future will look like us.

🇪🇺 It was hard to miss Balderton’s Built in Europe campaign this week. The attempts to mold the vibe shift seemed well-received and pointed to an appealing way forward for UK collaboration with the rest of Europe. I’ll be keeping an eye on whether it has a lasting impact.

💷 The Information Commissioner has continued to draw his £200,000 annual salary despite not working since February and returning to New Zealand, Joseph Bambridge reports on Politico.

⛪ For The New Statesman, I analysed what Tony Blair and The Pope have in common regarding their approaches to AI.

One benefit of looking back just a few years is that it allows us to better understand what’s new and what’s not about our own times.

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Recently I went down to Vauxhall to visit the offices of ClearScore, one of the big success stories of the UK’s fintech boom. While several of the memorable names from that time – Monzo, Revolut, Starling – are challenger banks, Clearscore took a different approach by providing credit scores and reports for users, for free. It has since grown to offer a range of services, and is estimated to be worth £1.5bn-£2.5bn if it were to IPO any time soon.

Co-founder and CEO Justin Basini set up the business in 2015. A serial entrepreneur, he had also spent time at Deutsche Bank and Capital One, so he was in a good position to join the burgeoning fintech community that began coalescing in London early last decade.

Just over ten years on, I wondered what he made of that period now, and what we could learn from it as London goes through a fresh season of tech hype, this time centred on the AI industry.

Froth and the financial crisis

We can’t start straight away with the 2010s, the Tory government, open banking, the christening of Silicon roundabout, and all that. A closer parallel to current times, in Basini’s telling, would be the dot-com era. In an interview on the How to Fail podcast with Elizabeth Day (to whom Basini is married), he spoke about the days of his first startup Differ, which he ran 2000-2001. His description of that atmosphere could easily be mistaken for one about today.

All of this money coming in, everybody was going to be a millionaire. It was really exciting. And in London, it was super amazing. You’d go to things every evening, talking with entrepreneurs and technologists about how the world was going to change and what was going to happen.

I bring this up in our conversation and ask if the 2010s felt similar. “It was different because of austerity,” he explains. “The country was going through a really difficult time. You had a new government. You’ve just been through the global financial crisis, and so actually, it was quite a down time. And lots and lots of people were struggling.”

The excitement both during the dot-com boom and now is at such a scale that it can lead to “froth”. The early 2010s, by contrast, were not very frothy. Nevertheless, in 2010 Basini quit his job at Capitol One and started a new company, called Allow.

Raising money for that business, between 2010 and 2013, “was a difficult time”

“I had to see 75 VCs before I got any money”.

Still, he wasn’t alone. GoCardless, co-founded by Monzo founder Tom Blomfield, got its start in 2011. Others were beginning to work on neo-banking, with Atom becoming the first fully digital challenger in 2013.

“It was definitely the early stages, and there was a little community around the whole thing,” says Basini.

He estimates that the first time he heard the term “fintech” was in 2012 or 2013, though the concept had existed before then, going by its fuller name of financial technology. “From 2005 to 2010, people were talking about financial technology, and the digitalisation of banking, and apps .”

He points to Monitise, the company founded by Alastair Lukies and Steven Atkinson back in 2003, as a pioneer. The business was behind some of the earliest mobile banking functionality in the UK. It developed the Monilink service, which went live in late 2006. Making use of the existing ATM network, it allowed users to check their bank balances from their phones.

“You were seeing the early stages of in-your-hand access to your bank, connectivity with your banks, with the information that your bank holds,” Basini recalls. “That’s the way that it was starting.”

While the financial crash may have made life tough for those looking to raise startup capital, it was also an accelerant for this nascent fintech industry.

After Allow had shut down, Basini did a stint at fledgling mobile payments Zapp (now Mastercard’s Pay by Bank app). But he was soon back in the founder seat. He had learned from his time at Capital One the power of data. With Allow, a personal data brokerage, he had attempted to turn that into a business. But he found that the concept was too complicated to explain. “Consumer propositions need to be explainable in 10 words or less.”. Instead, he came up with a simpler concept: letting people check their credit scores.

How things line up

At this time, things were hotting up. Starling launched in 2014. Monzo and Revolut followed in 2015. This was also when ClearScore was born.

What other factors, I ask Basini, had to line up to allow the creation of Clearscore and its peers?

He starts off by giving credit to the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), a tax relief created in 2012 under the Cameron government. Though EIS already existed, this new scheme was more tailored to early-stage companies. Both, he says, “have been amazing at creating money flowing into small companies”. It was “a genius move”.

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A culture shift over the course of the 1990s and 2000s had meanwhile made the market more amenable to new brands. Basini gives a nod here to the website MoneySuperMarket, which since the 1990s had helped make information about financial products far more easy to find online. At the same time, the likes of Capital One and other monoline credit card providers came in, offering more choice. “And what’s happening is the UK consumer is being taught to shop around.” The default was no longer to go to one’s bank for every single financial product but to compare alternatives.

The formation of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) between 2012 and 2014 was also significant because it marked a new era of competition, in part as a direct response to the financial crisis. As new lenders entered the market, “the government and the regulator is embracing it because they don’t want big Banks to be too big, and they want competition”, says Basini, who these days sits on the board of the CMA.

The regulator would also be part of one of the most significant moves for the explosion of fintech products. By mandating Open Banking implementation in 2016, it made it easier for startups to launch apps that could integrate with a customer’s existing financial information held by their main bank.

All of this was happening concurrently with the technology advances that made it possible, most importantly the rapid improvement of smartphones and their widespread adoption. Now all consumers had the hardware to access online financial services on the go.

If we take a moment to review here, you can see all the ingredients that go into making a thriving tech ecosystem: advancing technology, regulation and government incentives that encourage new business and competition, and consumers ready to give it a go.

Riding the luck

Momentum was building, and Basini says it was clear by the mid-2010s that the fintech boom was “definitely a thing”.

“It was definitely strategic for the UK to be backing it. It was definitely seen as a good thing, and those of us that were setting up felt like, you know, we had the wind at our backs.”

Not all the brands launched in that time have survived. So why did the ones we still know today succeed? Luck, mostly, he says. But that alone is not enough. “You need to ride your luck.” One common theme he sees is that the winners of that era put product first. Basini may have a slight bias here, considering himself a product guy and counting Steve Jobs as one of his inspirations on that front. But it is a reading that makes sense for this background setting of increased competition and customer choice.

Between 2015 and 2020, ClearScore went from zero customers to about 13 million. The company grew to 300 employees.

Memories of that time are illustrative of the chaos and excitement of being part of something growing so fast. In the business’s first office, a one-room in Hammersmith, Basini remembers getting everyone 80cm desks to fit everyone in. He also recalls how James Mantle – head of talent at ClearScore between 2016 and 2017 – would sit in a hallway, wired headphones plugged into his iPhone, talking to candidates, because there was no other space to take a call. According to Mantle’s LinkedIn, he was there for just under 18 months and oversaw more than 70 hires in that time.

“It comes along very, very rarely, and so that was an extraordinary experience,” Basini says of that time “It was super demanding, lots going on, but it was very exciting.”

Spades and foothills

Though the sector has had over ten years to mature, Basini says we are “still in the foothills” of what fintech can be.

Areas he thinks are still to be cracked include financial management – while lots of apps offer tools to help users with that, there still hasn’t been enough of a breakthrough on the consumer apathy point. Many people still just have a bank account and do very little with it.

Structurally, he sees more opportunities for open finance too. “If they want to open up SME lending in the UK, they should force HMRC to do an open banking-style access to all of the data that they hold. Vat receipts. Tax returns, etc.” There is some work happening on this in the ideas being trialled by the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT), but there is still much more that could be enabled.

As for the AI sector, Basini – ever the product guy – sees the next crop of exciting companies being those that translate the technology into interesting applications. If you’re supposed to sell spades in a gold rush, “I don’t think the Spades are OpenAI or Anthropic”.

“I think the spades are the companies now that are going to build on top of these things to really allow amazing use cases to happen.”

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

📙 I wrote a review of Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine for Beauhurst Insights

💜 Orbital Industries has raised a $50m Series B round led by plural. The company, which uses AI to design advanced materials, was co-founded by former DeepMind research Jonathan Godwin.

🧢 A sign that the baseball cap bullrun is only just beginning? Branded gifting and merch platform Go Swag has raised $5m to expand its operations.

📲 German agentic customer support company Parloa has opened a London office and is hiring.

🎵 Really captured the 2010s startup vibes while writing this today by listening to some of my favourite work-friendly music: the score of WeCrashed.

But in business, it can be a barrier. Young startup founders flee to the optimism of San Francisco because they need it (and the deep pockets of American investors) to make their moonshots. A couple of years ago Tom Blomfield, founder of Monzo, wrote a widely circulated blog post lamenting a pessimism in Britain’s national character “that often makes people believe they’re destined to fail before they start”.

When we put our minds to it, though, we are perfectly capable of delivering successful, ambitious projects that in turn beget new opportunities. Nowhere has this been more neatly or publicly illustrated recently than in the production of Saturday Night Live UK.

Getting past the cringe barrier

Besides thinking you can build a billion-dollar business, thinking you can get on national television and make people laugh has to be one of the highest forms of hubris. To attempt it with material written mere days or hours ago looks like delusion.

This was the challenge that SNL UK faced upon launch, combined with the fact that it is a transatlantic spin-off of a beloved cultural institution. Many concluded it would be a disaster.

“If Australia had an SNL coming, everyone would be so excited there,” observes Lu Jackson, an Australian who has lived in the UK for 20 years. She is the founder of comedy industry platform Craic and chairs a newly formed trade body for the sector, CRAFT. “Here, people were like nope, it’s going to fail, it’s going to be shit.”

Perhaps the word that best describes how commentators thought this would go is cringe. This is a universal concept but there is a certain British version of it. The idea plays into something of our culture of risk aversion, linking shame not just to having failed but to having tried in the first place.

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Yet against the odds – if one can even say the odds are against you with a budget of £2m an episode – SNL UK has been a success. With decent ratings and surprisingly complimentary reviews, it has proven there is a space for live sketch comedy. It has also created a new outlet for both political satire and some hyper-specific observational comedy about British culture.

It hasn’t always hit the mark. Comedy, after all, is divisive. Despite its 50-year run, even the original SNL often faces accusations that it has lost its magic. Yet it keeps going, reinventing itself. The beauty of sketch comedy is that not everyone has to like it.

I am by no means the first to observe that there are parallels between professional comedians and startup founders. Improv teaches you how to pivot; stand-up how to present. Last year there was even a book, Pitch Sketch Launch, about what the SNL method could teach us about product development.

But perhaps the biggest lesson here is about fear. Not to sound like a Waterstones shelf full of self-help books, but embracing a do-it-anyway attitude is the only way to achieve anything in the face of pessimism.

In Silicon Valley, a failed startup is even seen as a badge of honour.

Embracing the possibility of failure as a natural part of making something is key to the ethos of startup-building. And to Saturday Night Live. The chaos of live television with hundreds of moving parts means the constant threat that it could all go wrong, and that’s why it’s so exciting.

Furthermore, failure is not to be sniffed at when it’s a sign of having tried in the first place. SNL alum Will Ferrell once said in a commencement address at the University of Southern California, “my fear of failure never approached in magnitude my fear of ‘what if?’. What if I never tried at all?”

Creating space for careers

But overcoming fear of failure should not rest with the individual alone. In tech especially, the veneration of the founder figure can mean we forget about the systems that beget them.

Sometimes you need a more powerful entity – be it a government, an investor, an accelerator, or executive producer Lorne Michaels – to step in and create opportunities for long-term development. I don’t think it’s fair to expect Britain’s would-be founders to do all the work of overcoming their pessimism and tendency towards risk aversion alone.

Here is where I want to make the second, potentially more divisive part of my argument: I think it would have been worth creating SNL UK even if it hadn’t turned out to be any good.

When a startup fails, the assets it leaves behind go beyond a few second-hand laptops. The people who worked there take everything they learned to their next job. They remain part of the ecosystem, possibly even benefiting from a boost to their careers as a result of their battle scars.

The same goes for any project where people come together to do something ambitious. Whether or not it worked, SNL UK would have always given its writers and performers a shot at trying out an undertaking of this scale. While everyone always hopes the final product will be a success, it’s OK to back ideas that contribute something positive to the world in general.

According to James Abraham, a fractional chief of staff who has also spent time performing comedy, both the TV commissioning industry and the startup support ecosystem in the UK, “would benefit from being optimistic, taking bigger swings like SNL UK which can inspire ripples of increased attention, optimism and investment in adjacent opportunities”.

In this way, SNL UK reminds me less of a traditional venture-oriented startup accelerator, and more of some of the different approaches I’ve covered in the past for people who don’t fall squarely into one basket, whether they’re straddling academia and entrepreneurship with Encode: AI for Science fellowship or creating new links between art and tech through the Restless Egg incubator.

From speaking to Jackson and Abraham, I realised there’s another parallel between comedy and tech, which is that once one thing does well, there can be a tendency to keep repeating it instead of coming up with something new. Abraham would like to see both the comedy and tech ecosystems feature more grassroots support, “helping ideas that don’t have a proven track record survive long enough to build one”.

I think there is also space here for British big swings to have their own national character. SNL UK has been a success in part because it borrows its mother show’s format, but executes it with a different tone – one that is more sardonic, deadpan, sometimes a little surreal, often dark and, yes, cynical. It’s a very British success story, which shows we can use our own cynicism as a strength instead of a reason to never get started.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🏈 For Unherd I wrote about how tech shows like TBPN are re-running the sports media playbook. The piece even got a brief mention on TBPN itself at the start of yesterday’s episode.

🎶 Speaking of tech ecosystems, Chris Stokel-Walker has a good analysis of how Spotify alumni have shaped Sweden’s tech scene.

🇪🇺 Sticking with Sweden for a minute, the EU has selected Swedish investment firm EQT to run its €5bn scale-up fund. The fund will invest directly in companies from Series B onward, with investments expected in the range of €100 million.

💸 The FCA is opening applications again for its Scale-up Unit, which helps fast-growing fintechs navigate regulation.

🏙️ I went to the opening of Salesforce’s new AI centre in the City yesterday, and wrote about it for The Morning Intelligence.

↙️ SXSW London is coming up at the start of June, but once again there doesn’t seem to be an official directory of side/fringe events. Should I compile one? If you’re hosting or going to any, let me know. I’ll also be at the main conference for at least a couple of days.

DJ sets from Gareth Deakin, Digital Selves and Y7 provided the backdrop as guests chatted in the Listening Room at MOI, a Japanese restaurant slap-bang in the middle of London’s central Soho district.

It was a tech party, but not as you know it. Hosted jointly by quantum computing company Moth and artist-founder incubator Restless Egg, the focus was on the intersection of art and technology.

“My favourite word is ‘scenius’, the Brian Eno term for the genius of the scene, not the individual,” Restless Egg’s co-founder William Morgan, standing a head taller than everyone else in the room and sporting a green suit, told the crowd. “I’m extremely cognisant of the fact that it is this group of people and the type of energy that comes from this group of people that makes this possible.”

The event was held to mark the upcoming launch of Restless Egg’s next open call to artist-founders, on the theme ‘Luxury Technology’.

“We don’t mean necessarily premium branding,” Morgan explained. “We’re thinking about the way that from the point of view of capital, the AI build-out is already a luxurious form of expenditure.

“So much money is being spent on the data centre programme. And yet, from the point of view of most people, these technologies are increasingly unpopular – or even if not unpopular, felt and received in a way that is a demand for more and more productivity.”

The question for this batch, then, is what kinds of products and technologies could be developed to deliver “a novel form of life or experience”.

An afterlife for art and technology

On Wardour Street, Morgan and I enjoyed a reprieve between the heavy showers and the hailstorms to stand outside the venue and talk. As we watched people queue for upscale streetwear brand Stüssy across the road, he explained the thinking behind Restless Egg.

Founders get a six-month programme, an initial investment of $50,000, and the opportunity to raise up to $150,000 more.

Alongside co-founders Sylvan Rackham and Sam Lipnick, Morgan set up the initiative in late 2024 in response to a perceived gap. While there were plenty of fellowships, residencies, and other time-limited programmes to explore how art could interact with technology, many struggled to have an “afterlife”.

Morgan cited the example of Antikythera, a philosophy of technology think tank where he spent time as an AI studio researcher. At the close of the six-month residency, he felt a sense of an abrupt ending. “I was like, wait a second. What are we supposed to do now? Do we just go back to our normal lives?” There had to be a way to maintain the collaborative spirit that comes from bringing people together to make things.

“I eventually came to the conclusion that what these people were missing was an additional financial infrastructure to allow them to access the kinds of capital that would make it possible for them to scale their ideas,” he said.

Other inspirations included historic innovation clusters like Xerox Parc, Bell Labs, and the UK’s own Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU).

Restless Egg has previously backed the likes of Fuser, a creative AI workflow startup, curated feed creators Self Engineering, and Yaya Labs, a studio whose projects include robot dog fighting.

Reimagining funding

The creative approach of the incubator doesn’t stop with the company selection. The organisers are always thinking about how the model can be different from the standard startup conveyor belt.

For this next batch, Morgan and Lipnick are introducing a new funding structure to reflect how much faster and cheaper companies are now being built thanks to agentic coding tools. Previously the incubator would have used a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) note, a popular startup funding mechanism which relies on the company raising money at a later date. But now businesses are now generating income without needing any further investment.

Restless Egg is therefore trying out a SAFE with a Shared Earnings side letter, inspired by Tyler Tringas’s Calm Fund. After a grace period, backers get a quarterly dividend, giving them a return without founders having to take on the pressure of venture-scale funding.

“If they build a small or medium-sized business that quickly becomes profitable, generates a bunch of revenue, we can support that,” Morgan told me.

He argued that this could even become a structural advantage, where distinctiveness acts as a moat against scale-obsessed competitors. “We think that, honestly, that’s the way a lot of category creation will happen because things that look small and niche now are really good in a world where people are increasingly resistant to AI slopification.”

Mapping the creative technology ecosystem

As I’ve written before, London is now a key hub for this kind of work, in part because the capital is not a company town. It’s an everything town. Finance, theatre, politics, fine art, music, academia and AI all converge here. The other cities with strong claims to be the creative technology hub would be New York and Berlin, but many seem happy to work across these cities. Moth, for example, has a New York office, while Restless Egg previously held an event in Berlin.

“We’re able to be kind of cynical and witty in our creative practices, while also being real innovators and disruptors,” Harry Kumar, Moth’s co-founder and chief creative officer, told me later in the evening when I asked what the UK had going for it. He sees those characteristics as UK-wide, but in London “you have the benefits of capital and a kind of global footprint and melting pot. So I do think those conditions give rise to incredible creative projects and practices.”

Other centres of gravity in the space include the Serpentine’s Arts Technologies programme and Sarah Drinkwater’s early-stage fund Common Magic. There are new arrivals too, like Somerset House’s just-announced n-Space project and the upcoming Creative Intelligence festival at the Southbank Centre, which aims to revive the Festival of Britain spirit. Restless Egg will host its next demo day during the latter.

The challenge for this scene will be holding its own as more venture capital floods into the UK tech scene (see today’s links below for a flavour of the pace at which this is happening) and the hyperscalers move in.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🦋 The other topic of last night was Moth’s upcoming quantum computing-powered game, Quantum Backrooms, which sounds very trippy. Join their mailing list to find out more.

🇨🇦 From Canada, this is an interesting story of how Alberta’s public servants built their own new systems instead of using a slow and costly procurement process.

🪙 , the Bitcoin-focused coworking space and incubator I wrote about earlier this year, has just opened applications for its next cohort.

🍪 Fractile, which is building chips it says could radically improve the speed of AI systems, has raised $220m.

🧬 Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spinoff, has raised $2.1bn to scale its AI drug discovery. It also became the latest addition to the list of Sovereign AI Fund investments.

👑 Meanwhile, Suzanne Ashman was named Sovereign AI’s managing partner. She’ll lead the £500m fund, expanding its footprint in the UK AI ecosystem.

🪏 A happy week for the Ashman-Blair household: Euan Blair’s edtech company Multiverse has just raised $70m to hit a $2.1bn valuation.

🏗️ Recursive came out of stealth with a $650m raise and offices in San Francisco and London, to tackle the question of what happens when AI can build itself.

💂 Coming up at the end of the month, the Greater London Project is hosting its first ever summit on Saturday 30 May.

🧑‍⚖️ On the same day, AI-native law firm Lawhive is hosting a legaltech hackathon.

📚 FT journalist Sarah O’Connor has a new book out about the future of work, and will be talking about it at a few dates next month, including at Conway Hall on 7 June and Backstory Bookshop on 9 June. Thanks for highlighting this one.

Everyone is hunting for AI-shaped problems.

You can see it in startups engaged in a gold rush to crack automating all kinds of workflows, no matter how niche. You can see it in big businesses, aware they need adoption. And you can see it in government, where everyone knows there are legacy systems that could benefit from a technical breakthrough, but fears things may already be too broken.

At present, there are several projects inside the UK government driven by an optimistic view that yes, we can solve some issues with tech. In these corners, the finding of AI-shaped problems is treated in a suitably mathematical way: teams come up with options, whittle them down through elimination, then build and test their ideas to see if they work.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a handful of these demonstrated at the Society for Technological Advancement (SoTA) Frontiers Night featuring the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.ai), a small but determined set of engineers and project managers in the heart of Whitehall. It was my third time seeing members of this cohort present, and one particular product has come up every time. It’s called Extract.

Here’s how the pitch usually goes. At this very moment, underneath your local council building, there is probably a dingy cellar filled almost to the brim with paper.

This is where planning documents go to never see the light of day again. Local authority employees have allegedly been known to wish for a convenient flood.

But what if they could all be turned into data? And what if that data could be used to help speed up planning decisions and, through a meme-worthy domino effect, eventually get the Government closer to achieving its 1.5 million new homes?

Extract, developed by i.ai alongside the digital planning team in the Ministry for Housing, Communities, and Local Government (MHCLG) is an AI tool that converts old – sometimes hand-edited, sometimes poorly photocopied documents – into a usable geospatial database.

The product has become one of the poster children for the Government’s embrace of AI. Almost a year ago, the Prime Minister spoke about it at London Tech Week, pledging that it would be made available to all councils by Spring 2026.

From what I understand, this rollout is now within reach and should be happening next month. “Spring”, after all, ends in late June, astronomically speaking – and in Whitehall terms.

The other big development is that work on an augmented planning tool is now getting underway, after Google DeepMind and Faculty won an £8.2m contract to develop it in February. The contract for that procurement has now been signed.

What happens next with Extract and the augmented planning tool will be a significant test case for this era of nimble AI projects hoping to have outsized impacts on government. The rollout of Extract will be the biggest expansion of an i.ai tool beyond Whitehall (a transcription app, Minute, is used by just over 20 councils, but this will be going out to all 300+). Meanwhile the AI-assisted planning decisions tool raises a lot of questions. I’ve been speaking to people who watch this area closely in the past couple of weeks and though many would like to be optimistic, they foresee challenges ahead. It could either prove controversial – giving political fodder to campaigners on either side to blame a “bot” for decisions they don’t like – or may even be ineffective for the ultimate goal of getting more homes built, if it simply replicates past decisions.

Green and pleasant data

Extract is nowhere near the first government tool to be aimed at upgrading planning data. MHCLG already funds local authorities to do data remediation work through the Open Digital Planning programme. There are also other projects like PlanX, a software co-designed with local planning authorities (LPAs).

That image of the basement overstuffed with paper is an evocative one, but it isn’t the full story. Plenty of work has already been done to digitise planning documents.

What Extract could do is level this up. Using the advanced visual reasoning of Google’s Gemini model, it can turn documents into easily usable maps. Even if a document is already available in PDF form, the proposition of Extract is that it makes it far easier to turn that into geospatial data.

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Steve Messer, who worked on Extract from the MHCLG side, told me it’s a “growth hack” for the existing planning data platform. Some successful work has already been done to get councils publishing their planning data to that platform more quickly. The hope is that Extract will speed things up further.

This might have effects beyond government. A problem that proptech software providers face in this space is the lack of reliable, up-to-date data. That’s a barrier for creating innovative AI tools. “Realistically, any other AI won’t have any trustworthy data to use unless the planning data platform has datasets,” Messer said.

The big bet on planning

The origin of Extract was in meetings between i.ai and MHCLG in late 2024. But the inception of the augmented planning tool stemmed from the arrival of Jade Leung, the Prime Minister’s AI adviser, to Number 10.

She pushed the incubator team to look at some big bets. This led to a focus on planning, and eventually to a procurement process. Housing minister Matthew Pennycook confirmed in the Commons in March that the government intended to award Google and Faculty an £8.2m contract to develop an AI-powered planning tool. Trials in England should start this month.

The big hope for this initiative is that it will dramatically reduce planning application processing times, with the initial goal of slashing the eight-week wait in half to four weeks. Part of what would make this possible will be the data digitised by Extract.

This tool though will probably face its fair share of skepticism, not least from planners themselves.

Messer has previously pointed out in a blogpost that automating decisions which have traditionally been made by highly accredited professions is not necessarily straightforward. The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), for example, requires members to set out their decision-making process.

Indeed, Daniel Slade of the RTPI told the FT this week that AI should never replace professionals, and that there was a danger of redesigning the planning system itself for the benefit of the technology. “There’s no value in processing applications more quickly if the developments that follow are low quality,” he said.

It could also be a tricky sell with the general public. One can imagine the headlines: “Bots build on green belt!” Councillors looking for a reason to block a development that their constituents don’t like might see an opportunity in rejecting the claims of a computer, even though with this system, humans will make the final decisions once AI has compiled a recommendation.

You might expect the people advocating for planning reform and building new homes to be excited by this development, but many of those I spoke to gave something closer to a shrug. Speeding up decisions won’t help solve the planning system’s biggest issues or help gather the political will to change it, they said.

“Like with so much else in the government’s AI strategy, it will be a well-intentioned distraction from fixing the bigger problems, which are constrained not by technology but by political economy,” Jamie Rumbelow, formerly founder of proptech company Tract, told me.

The project might be a big swing, but many think we need an even bigger one to fix planning. Still, if planning decisions really do become twice as fast, there’s an opportunity for something the government is looking for: ways to show the public real, tangible benefits of AI.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🪺 Coming up next week, I’ll be at Land Talks on Monday and Restless Egg on Thursday.

⏳ The next Long Now London meeting is taking place on Wednesday.

🧑‍🎨 Really enjoyed this piece from M.J. Hines, arguing that the UK needs a new creative director.

🗳️ For the New Statesman, I explored the world of synthetic polling and asked where the line should be with this technology.

📳 The return of Pornhub to the UK is an interesting development in the online age verification debate. Management says it can now rely on device-level age checks thanks to an Apple update. Is this going to resolve some of the angst over how to enforce age controls online?

🕚 Elevenlabs revealed some new investors, including Eva Longoria.

🔨 I wrote about the skills gap for The Morning Intelligence this week. Tom is also hosting an event on Monday to discuss the fallout of local elections for tech policy.

🧟 My friend Jonathan wrote this fascinating essay about technological necropolitics.

🍎 Over on the Progress Post, I argued that Oak Apple Day should be revived and made into a new bank holiday. Cheers!

In speech, I can’t seem to get what I want to say right on the first try. For that, I’ve always turned to writing, in which I can draft, delete, edit, re-draft, hand over to someone else to take a look.

But today I’m attempting to dictate the introduction to this newsletter using Wispr Flow. It is not a comfortable experience. My thoughts seem to travel faster to my fingers than they do to my voice. Despite that, once I figure out the sentence, I can’t deny that speaking is definitely much faster than typing.

There’s also, how shall I put it? A sense of embarrassment. Nobody is here to listen to me, but in a way that makes it worse. I’m just sat here alone, talking to my laptop.

I would feel more awkward about confessing this awkwardness if I didn’t know that even Lauren Ingram, the new country manager for Wispr AI, also feels this same hesitation.

“There is something kind of cringe about properly talking out loud,” she tells me on a call earlier this week. “I would sometimes talk actually out loud when my partner’s out of the house but when he’s in the house, I will be whispering into my mic.”

This she attributes to a need to get over the “British cringe feeling”.

Despite this national bashfulness, Wispr has managed to find a market in the UK without even trying. “Wispr didn’t sit down one day and decide to conquer the UK market,” co-founder Tanay Kothari wrote in a blog post last month. “You came to us.”

At the time of that announcement, UK users had dictated over 300 million words using Wispr Flow in the past month. By the time Ingram and I catch up, that has risen to 500 million in the last 30 days.

“People seem to get really obsessed with it,” she says. “I was kind of organically hearing about it, people basically seem to want to talk about it.”

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Given interest is growing naturally, why hire a country manager?

“There’s a real opportunity to get this really right,” Ingram says. Rather than just making a few tweaks for British English, the team wanted someone on the ground who was embedded in the market.

Of course, tech companies have always added localisation efforts once their products start picking up international users. But Ingram explains that Daniel McCallum, Wispr’s CMO, has been very clear that this is “not a lift-and-shift”.

The company is not alone in wanting to capture local nuance. A couple of months ago, design software company Canva put out a job listing for a Head of Making Canva Feel British. Clay, an AI sales tool, is opening its first international office in London. Last month, DC-based Capitol AI set up a board of advisors including former FT editor Lionel Barber and Lord Vaizey, as well as opening a UK office and hiring a GTM lead for the country.

In a Londonmaxxing frame of mind, it would be easy to get too excited about these. Companies want growth, so there is nothing especially groundbreaking about international expansion.

But in the context of optimism about London’s tech scene, each one is at least an additional vote of confidence. It also reflects huge demand coming from the country. Anecdotally, Ingram says she has heard from other AI and tech companies that they are seeing “massive usage in the UK, and so similarly they want to get it right in this market”. She points to PowerPoint rival Gamma, which recently held a “world tour” with only three stops. London was one of them.

For those hoping to see a flood of hiring in the capital as a result, though, don’t get too excited just yet. Many of these newer product-driven startups are keeping things lean: Gamma only had 52 staff when it was valued at $2.1bn last year. Wispr, valued at about $700m in its last round, similarly has about 50 people on board.

For now, Ingram is the sole UK hire, though she is working with a network of freelancers and agencies. She’s “seeing what we can do in a kind of scrappy but strategic way”.

She sees several opportunities in the UK, one of which formed the basis of her first campaign in the country: accents.

“Historically Brits and lots of speakers with different accents and dialects and have been underserved by big tech companies,” Ingram explains.

I find myself nodding in recognition. I still remember some of the blunders Otter.ai came out with when I first started using it. Once when interviewing the Scottish boss of Fender Guitars, Andy Mooney, my app repeatedly transcribed “new player” as “nuclear”.

According to Ingram, there’s a notable contingent of Wispr Flow users based in Glasgow – notoriously a city with an accent that even other Brits can find tricky.

“We’ve heard, anecdotally anyway, that people are really glad to find a bit of voice technology that actually works for accents. So I feel quite proud of that even though I didn’t make the product myself.”

The grander vision for Wispr Flow, though, is that it will help usher in the next era of computer interfaces. The product in fact has its origins in hardware: Kothari and his co-founder Sahaj Garg originally planned to make a non-invasive wearable device. Though they later pivoted to a software approach, the spirit of proposing an alternative to smartphones and other screens remains.

“We do see it as a way to help people like divorce themselves from their screens,” Ingram says. Many tasks will still involve a device of course, but for messaging and email it can be an easy way to keep your eyes on your surroundings. “It’s good for those kind of in between moments,” she adds, noting that it’s especially helpful for parents who need to keep an eye on children.

Those are the instances where voice replaces typing, but I wonder if there’s also space for tools like these to capture thoughts you would never have written down otherwise – like a dreamcatcher for errant thoughts.

Ingram agrees. “We don’t have our best ideas sitting at our desks. We have these ideas in these unstructured time places like the shower.”

Perhaps the biggest area of growth for Wispr Flow though is at work, and especially for talking to AI. Rambling without knowing exactly what you want to say might not be ideal for talking to a colleague, but for an LLM, it’s all more data to get at what you actually need.

Having just come back from San Francisco and seen how Wispr staff integrate AI into their workflow, Ingram says the UK still has a bit of catching up to do.

“That’s quite a big opportunity. Like how can we how can we upskill this nation quickly?”

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

🧑‍💻 There was a good episode of Currently on Radio 4 about ARIA, presented by Evan Davis.

🚪 Jade Leung, the Prime Minister’s AI adviser, was interviewed by The Telegraph.

🟪 On Tuesday, Plural is hosting an event with Calossum CEO and co-founder Danyal Akarca.

🖥️ Are you a software update? Find out at the launch of the book of that name at Newspeak House next Thursday.

👝 The next Granola fireside is with Jack Zhang, CEO of Airwallex, on 6 May.

🐦 I did consider writing this week’s newsletter about two separate bouts of Twitter drama, but couldn’t quite bring myself to wade into it. Nevertheless, I did find the back-and-forth about whether ministers’ AI chat history should be FOI-able (and whether in practice it actually is) interesting. There was also a separate kerfuffle involving copyright campaigner Ed Newton-Rex, who claimed the SovAI Fund was open to backing companies that train on copyrighted work without a licence. SovAI chair James Wise refuted this in a reply to someone else, and perhaps somewhat unwisely (pardon the pun) called the people making a noise about this “internet trolls”. To me, both incidents raised questions about how the public, journalists and campaigners should be able to go about getting information out of government figures – and whether the existing norms here are especially irritating to tech people, used to being able to operate on ‘stealth mode’. If you have further thoughts on that topic, feel free to DM me.

📔 A reminder to sign up for our Frontier Tower salon discussion on authorship in the age of AI. We’ve now announced the stellar speaker line-up!

I got my first sight of the US Capitol on Monday. It impressed me far more than I had expected, a wedding cake of a building.

The reason I finally made it there was to observe the PauseAI US protest that was taking place outside. The campaign group, which is connected to but independent from PauseAI Global, had brought its volunteers together for several days of workshops, action, and meetings with lawmakers. Most of this took place privately, but the Monday afternoon demo was in public, so I went along.

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Since interviewing Michaël Trazzi and Denys Sheremet last year during their hunger strike outside the London offices of Google DeepMind, I’ve been keeping tabs on AI protests. In particular, I’ve traced whether those who fear a species-wide existential threat from the technology can build bridges with those more concerned about the potential impacts on jobs, creativity, the environment, mental health, and other areas. Connected to that is also the question of whether they can become an organised political force.

Transformer

‘Scream if you want to move slower!’ A nascent AI protest coalition comes together in London

“Look around you,” PauseAI Global’s CEO Maxime Fournes told protesters outside Google DeepMind’s headquarters on a chilly day in London late last month. “Look at who’s here today. We do not agree on everything. We come from different organizations, different backgrounds. We have different…

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6 months ago · 30 likes · 9 comments · Alys Key

The PauseAI US event was more focused on the latter of these, with the aim of creating connections between activists and elected representatives.

Holly Elmore, director of Pause AI US, said it was about getting constituents in the room, telling personal stories about their concerns regarding AI. “Of course, there’s industry concerns, but like, we are your people and the polls are showing how there is a lot of fear about this,” she said, summarising what volunteers had said in the meetings. “We need leadership.”

Over the course of a couple of days, volunteers were able to secure meetings with 74 offices of congresspeople and senators, some pre-arranged and others as walk-ins. Six were with the representatives themselves, while the rest were with their staff. The meetings comprised a mix of Democrats and Republicans (and one independent in the form of Maine senator Angus King), covering a total of 18 states.

They included the offices of several influential figures in tech policy, such as California congressman Ted Lieu, who co-chairs the House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy; Josh Hawley, who is co-sponsoring the Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act; and Big Tech critic Elizabeth Warren.

Felix de Simone, organising director at PauseAI US, helped with setting up the meetings and has personally met with over 100 offices in the past year. One takeaway from that work, he says, is that “offices writ large are more receptive to extinction risk than I think many people would have predicted”.

“When we were starting this work, I had people – who will remain nameless – telling me: you know, what? Don’t lead with this. It’s too weird. It sounds like science fiction. It’s too esoteric. You need to put it in terms these offices understand.”

It is surprisingly straightforward, apparently, to get a meeting with one’s representative by coming to Washington. Compared to the UK, it may be a little easier because officials have so many more staff – a congressman’s office is about triple the size of an average MP’s. Nevertheless Joseph Miller, director of PauseAI UK, was also at the protest on Monday and told me the British branch was considering doing something similar. They already had several meetings with MPs back when they were organising an open letter to Demis Hassabis which was signed by 63 parliamentarians last summer.

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I asked Elmore if one reason to start building relationships with these staffers and politicians was to provide an alternative to the pro-AI lobby, but she didn’t see it as a direct counterweight. “The idea that we’re going to match the AI Lobby like ever on anything is… it’s just not going to happen. They’re like the richest industry that has ever been. But we do have something that they could never have, which is all these authentic voices and experiences. We do have the public, you know? Because the public is worried about their safety, and they’re not thinking about a bottom line for the AI company.”

This came through in the speeches made by volunteers to the crowd of about 75 people when the demo got going. Some were tearful as they spoke of their anxieties about the future that would be left for their children.

It was a sunny day. A light breeze stripped the petals from nearby trees, as though their duty had been fulfilled by the annual cherry blossom celebrations over the weekend. The West Lawn of the Capitol struck me as a far nicer setting for a protest than Parliament Square, set far back from the traffic and with the kind of perfect grass that only US Government groundskeepers seem able to achieve.

Organisers set up a table with a large American flag as the centre of the event, and later handed out miniature stars and stripes to attendees. Some people arrived off the back of their last meetings of the day, still in smart clothing that they then swapped for a black Pause AI T-shirt. It was a pleasant scene, like a picnic with placards.

All of this took place, though, in the shadow of an unwelcome affiliation for the organisers. Last week, a man allegedly threw a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house, in one of two seemingly separate attacks aimed at the OpenAI boss’s address. The suspect in the first incident was found to have posted on the PauseAI Global Discord server. Both the Global and US branches of the group shared statements condemning violence and clarifying that the suspect never had a role in the campaign, and had been warned about one of his messages on the server. Nevertheless, several commentators, like a16z investor Justine Moore and FAI fellow Dean Ball, blamed the organisation’s rhetoric.

“The calls to say something about it were pretty question-begging,” Elmore told me. “And obviously motivated by certain people who benefit from spreading a narrative that the problem here is the enemy: the public interest group they were already trying to stop.”

Still, it reinforced her belief in the importance of strict rules for the group, which include zero tolerance of even joking about violence.

De Simone added that PauseAI US is “moving away from online oriented advocacy and towards local organising as the dominant thing for the US because you know, we really think that most movement happens on the ground,” and that this approach will “also be useful in terms of kind of tightening things up and preventing anyone from the fringe sneaking in”.

As Kyle Chayka wrote in his column for The New Yorker this week, if apocalyptic rhetoric is the problem then the labs themselves have been one of its main sources. Still, incidents like last week’s and the actions of people with even a tangential connection to the movement present a challenge for AI safety advocates. Most would rather be seen as grassroots constituents voicing their concerns to their representatives than as unpredictable radicals.

Another “failure mode” for the movement, as de Simone put it, would be for the issue to become too polarised. This has already started happening to some extent. As writes, “on the left, there is now a significant and diverse portion of the Dem base who oppose AI in principle and in practice”.

This is also something you can see emerging in the UK. At the London march organised jointly by PauseAI UK and Pull the Plug, several people I spoke to were Green Party supporters or otherwise habitual protest attendees who leaned left. Yet the Labour government is all in on AI – as last night’s Sovereign AI launch emphasised – and faces a similar problem to the Democrats in how to reconcile that with the public’s skepticism and even fear of the technology. That challenge will only grow on both sides of the pond as advocacy groups get more organised.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to reply to this email or DM me.

🪶 I am co-organising the next Frontier Tower salon on the evening of 5 May. It’s all about authorship in the age of AI. See you there.

✨ I wasn’t in town for last night’s launch of the Sovereign AI Unit. But I enjoyed reading Mike Butcher’s round-up of the tech scene’s reaction to the announcement on Pathfounders.

🍹 Notion’s John Hurley is having an impromptu drinks in London on Monday.

🏢 Anthropic and OpenAI have both announced expansions of their UK presence this week, and will both be taking up new offices in the Knowledge Quarter. Ah, to be a King’s Cross commercial estate agent.

⏰ has written an interesting piece about the “clock speed problem” of how innovation advances at different rates.

🏡 The next Land Talks is scheduled for 11 May and includes lightning talks about network states, planning rules, and the Battersea tube extension.

I was there to hear the case for autonomous vehicles in Washington DC, at an event hosted by Greg Rogers, a former Waymo policy campaigns lead and now the founder of a new pro-tech group called the Innovation Majority. Given the excitement around the upcoming rollout of this technology in London, I thought it would be interesting to see how things are going in another capital.

Slowly, it turns out.

The debate over whether to allow AVs has been going on for more than a decade. “Washington DC was one of the first locations in America to think about setting policies for autonomous vehicles, around the same time as California and Nevada, back in 2012,” Rogers explained in his introduction. “And yet today, DC does not yet have a framework to allow us to operate.”

I am by no means an expert on DC City Politics. For that, I will defer to this very thorough read by Andy Masley.

Andy Masley

What's blocking Waymo in DC and how can we fix it?

This post will be a very detailed overview for autonomous vehicle advocates to understand the situation in DC and pathways to legalization…

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5 months ago · 21 likes · 3 comments · Andy Masley

But to sum things up, much of the wait is down to a District Department of Transportation (DDOT) report, commissioned in 2020 and due by 2021, which is still not published. Rogers compared this delay to if Thomas Edison had invented the lightbulb, only for it to spend five years unused while consultants compiled a lengthy report about electricity.

Throw in political disagreement over the issue, including between the two most likely candidates to be the city’s next mayor, and it’s a tricky situation.

This particular panel was by no means a debate. Everyone agreed that AVs – Waymo’s offering in particular – would bring benefits to the city and should be allowed to operate.

Former DC mayor Anthony A. Williams, who is now CEO of economic development nonprofit Federal City Council, was among the speakers. Alongside him was ​Reverend Thomas L. Bowen, general secretary of the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Waymo’s own ​Tiffany Moore completed the set. She just joined the Alphabet-owned business earlier this year as head of federal policy and government affairs, having previously worked at the Consumer Technology Association.

The political stakes in DC are distinct from those in the UK. Like a company town hit by a factory closure, it was affected deeply by DOGE job cuts. Mayor Williams spoke of the need to rebuild the city’s economy, looking towards the AV providers as potential sources of new jobs. Much of the conversation also focused on transport inequality, in terms of how people without access to their own car might be losing out on job opportunities. There are even “ride-sharing deserts”, districts where it’s harder to get an Uber or equivalent, which Moore said would be addressed by AVs.

Discrimination also comes into play: both Mayor Williams and Reverend Bowen recalled instances of being unable to get taxis because of racial bias. Driverless cars, they implied, can display no such intolerance. “That cannot be overlooked,” Reverend Bowen said. “It’s about dignity, where people are viewed as the same.”

Where the issues most closely overlap with what we might expect to see in the UK is the question of jobs. For this, Moore offered two reassurances.

First, the maintenance of fleets of AVs will create plenty of new employment. “There’s an entire human infrastructure around that driverless vehicle, and those are local jobs.” This could translate into tens of millions of dollars of investment in the area across multiple depots, she said.

At the same time, she argued that this new transport option won’t change the landscape dramatically. Waymo’s entire US fleet numbers about 3,000 cars, which she said was similar to the number of ride-hailing vehicles out and about at typical peak time in DC alone. “We’re only talking about a sliver. It’s a compliment to the existing transportation ecosystem, not to replace it.”

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Moore was very diplomatic about the delays. “We’re waiting for our partners,” was all she said on the matter. But it must be frustrating. Indeed, the event itself was part of a growing effort to build support for AVs as the wait for their deployment in DC drags on. In February, Wired reported that Waymo was encouraging members of the public to pressure city officials on the issue. Axios also noted that the company is spending big on retainers to beef up its lobbying in the city. Meanwhile Thomas Hochman, a staffer a pro-technology think tank FAI, recently vibecoded a somewhat morbid death dashboard to keep track of traffic deaths that could supposedly have been avoided by the introduction of driverless vehicles.

London looks like it has more momentum. When Moore noted that DC has the opportunity to be the first capital city in the world to deploy AVs, I reflexively – smugly – thought: London’s going to get there first.

But UK advocates of the technology would be ill-advised to rest on their laurels. Just last week, transport commissioner Andy Lord said Transport for London (TfL) could block robotaxi services if they don’t meet the authority’s private hire standards – adding that none of them currently do.

The conversation in DC is very different for obvious reasons to do with the cultural and political landscape. But listening in on this conversation suggested a possible future for London: one in which barrier after bureaucratic barrier slows progress.

This becomes especially challenging if the public has no stake in the tech. A new survey from the Institute for Driverless Transport this week found that a third of the British public say they see no benefits to autonomous vehicles. As I wrote last month, opinions on this kind of tech often improve primarily by exposure to it. So until AVs hit the road properly in both London and DC, their promoters face one of policy’s most difficult challenges: fear of the unknown.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

📃 Why is the number of patents filed in the UK declining? A new CPS report digs in.

📙 For UnHerd, I read Sebastian Mallaby’s new biography of Demis Hassabis and scrutinised how the DeepMind boss is trying to shape his own reputation.

🏙️ Ramen Space is hosting this Londonmaxxing meetup in Dalston on the evening of 23 April.

💫 As you’ve probably seen already, plans for Britain’s “Stargate” are on hold, as OpenAI says the “right conditions” are not in place to proceed.

📧 Over on LinkedIn, I put together a summary of what kinds of people I’d like to interview for this newsletter in the coming months. I’ve had tonnes of responses already, but you can see it in full here.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stocks this week. Specifically, I’ve been reminiscing about the time I suddenly found stocks exciting, which was 2021. This was during the SPAC boom – or was it the IPO boom, or was it the crypto boom, or was it the memestock boom?

Back then, I was a financial journalist increasingly distracted from pensions and property and drawn towards the madcap world of tech. The big characters of British business were growing old or going out of fashion. Now, the most compelling personalities were to be found in Silicon Valley – or else running elaborate crypto schemes from the Bahamas or South Korea.

More interesting still was the way investing was becoming a form of entertainment. I came across the subreddit r/wallstreetbets about a month before the Gamestop short squeeze and watched the whole debacle play out in real time, fascinated by how online culture was fusing with the markets.

Nobody emblematised those converging trends better than Elon Musk. So when his company SpaceX filed for a mega-IPO this week, I was transported back to that moment and wondered if we’re in for a new period of anarchic, occasionally foolish but frequently fun investing activity.

What part will Britain’s stocks play in this? Probably not a great deal. Other than the trades which take place in the ether of the blockchain or on Polymarket, investing-as-entertainment focuses primarily on US stocks. Of course, the nature of this contemporary, always-on speculation is that anyone can buy shares listed anywhere in the world from their apps. Yet it’s the US market that attracts the most attention. Indeed, stock markets are kind of the original attention economy.

The closest thing I can remember to British companies commanding this kind of retail investor-friendly excitement was during the equity crowdfunding boom of the 2010s.

Seedrs and Crowdcube competed to host the biggest raises of capital from ordinary investors into craft gin brands, biscuit delivery services, and banks. The recent fate of BrewDog and its equity punk backers is the most high-profile example of what happened to a lot of these in the end1. Many went bust or have been absorved, while others are still trundling along but aren’t likely to have an exit any time soon. The notable exceptions have been Revolut and Monzo. We’ll come back to those in a moment.

It was inevitable that some of these businesses would fail; investors knew that. Still, these stories did not help to dispell this country’s risk-averse tendencies. Regulators often err towards limiting what retail investors can do with their own money, while the public perception of those who take a chance is often a retrospective sneer. With hindsight, we can pronounce it to have been a stupid idea in the first place. But by that logic, so was backing a bank in 2016 that didn’t get its UK banking licence until earlier this year. It’s worked out alright for Revolut backers so far.

Other opportunities to allow British markets a slice of the latest craze have gone missed. In early 2024, the new hot thing was Bitcoin ETFs – investment vehicles through which investors could track the price of the cryptocurrency without directly owning the asset itself. As new offerings crowded into the New York markets, British regulators remained reluctant to approve anything similar. The FCA allowed the less sexy crypto ETNs, with the caveat that they could only be traded by professionals. The closest one could get to a British Bitcoin ETF was one listed in Guernsey (you can read ’s award-winning article about it here).

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What I’m getting at here is that we haven’t always been the best at capitalising on investor interest. This is arguably a sensible approach that avoids some of the worst excesses of speculation. But that sense of fun that is intrinsic to contemporary investing cannot exist without risk. Meanwhile caution feeds into some of the narratives about London that hold it back.

In a new report published this week, researchers at KPMG argued that the narrative about London as a place to IPO is wrong, and that talking the capital down is only contributing to a problem of perception. Part of that reputation is down to how British investors are seen:

UK investors are often viewed as cautious compared with US counterparts, with a stronger focus on well-established, dividend-paying businesses. In contrast, US investors – often former founders themselves – tend to take a portfolio approach, accepting that a smaller number of outliers will make the majority of returns. That difference in risk appetite can influence valuations and shape where companies ultimately decide to list.

There’s a vicious cycle at play here: give UK investors fewer opportunities to take risks and they’ll obviously be averse to them. Or perhaps they’ve seen that the risk isn’t leading to big enough rewards even when successful. To create a sense of excitement, there needs to be belief that something truly big can happen.

This was precisely what Londonmaxxing tried to do for the city’s tech landscape more generally. Recently. I asked Nick Patience, practice lead for AI at The Futurum Group, how the meme could be translated into something more solid – would it be possible, for example, to revive the London Stock Exchange as a venue for tech listings?

He said he was sceptical about the levers available: the US markets offer deeper liquidity, better analyst coverage of growth companies and investors more comfortable with tech valuations. “Regulatory changes to listing rules, which the UK has made, help at the margin but don’t address the liquidity gap directly.” There is also just a limit to what Britain can do to change the situation, since “the IPO question is one where the city is more subject to global capital market forces than to anything it can directly control”.

If it can be achieved, though, he reckons the biggest payoff would be in that same thing KPMG identified: perception.

“Where I think a more active tech IPO market would genuinely matter is symbolic as much as practical,” he told me “A handful of high-profile tech listings on the LSE would signal that London is a place where companies choose to stay and grow, not just a place to incubate before exiting. That signal matters for founders making location decisions and for the wider narrative about the City.”

Attracting some buzzy companies to list in London would also present the best shot of the UK getting a place in this cultural zeitgeist around finance that I’m talking about. It would be cool to see London have its own version of the New York Review of Finance, or the Polymarket Situation Room bar; something that acknowledges how finance and culture are only growing closer together.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.

💳 On a related note, Monzo has pulled out of the US to focus on its UK and Europe operations. Good news for those hoping it will IPO in London?

🍟 Doing its own chips could be the “shot in the arm that Arm needs”, comments in City A.M., in a column about the “expensive gamble” of Cambridge'-based Arm’s new strategy.

🚙 Here in DC, there’s an interesting debate going on about autonomous vehicles. has written a thorough breakdown of what’s blocking Waymo in the city. This may be worth keeping an eye on for those with an interest in how this technology will be rolled out in the UK.

🔧 The next AI Tinkerers London event is on 7 April and features a fireside chat with Sequoia partner Julien Bek. It looks pretty heavily subscribed already but here’s the link to register.

With its Palladian structure and fantastical painted ceiling, the last remaining vestige of the Palace of Whitehall made for a very grand backdrop to Anthropic’s first major UK public policy event last week. It also happens to be the site of Charles I’s execution, but we won’t read too much into that.

The morning brought together researchers, people from government and think tanks, and others from the AI ecosystem. This was not like the hacker-focused industry events that have been driving hype in recent weeks. Instead, it served more as an official introduction to the company; a Westminster debutante ball for Claude.

Anthropic now employs 200 people in the UK, making London the largest office outside of San Francisco. But it would be hasty to read into this any nod towards those courting the company to move here. A couple of days before the event, the business said it plans to create just as many jobs in Dublin by 2027. Last year it also opened outposts in Paris and Munich.

I had gone in expecting to see some hard lobbying. A few years ago, I often went to events with this kind of set-up that were organised by crypto companies. They would book out plush hotel function rooms and secure ministerial keynotes and wear suits, all to demonstrate that they had adults in the room.

The purpose of those was to woo regulators and lawmakers, putting the hard sell on them in terms of what blockchain could do for the country, and showing willingness – even eagerness – to be regulated.

Yet Anthropic played things a lot softer. There was no laundry list for ministers. Instead, government was spoken of as a partner.

(I’m writing in a slightly roundabout, passive construction here because the event was conducted under Chatham House Rules. That means I can tell you a bit about what was said, but not who said it or who else was there.)

Anthropic already has partnerships with the UK Government. This originated in its work with the AI Security Institute (AISI) a memorandum signed last year, in which Anthropic agreed to work on citizen-facing tools and to explore other areas such as AI for science. Earlier this year, the company was selected to provide chat services within the new GOV.UK app.

But between the 101 explanation of agentic AI, the run-down of current safety thinking, and the live demos of products, one got the sense that the company would like a greater presence across more departments and agencies. After all, the public sector is ramping up its spending on AI contracts.

One of the demo stands, which showed off the Claude plug-in for Excel, was even named ‘In Whitehall’. I thought this was especially interesting because if you look at why some AI tools have failed to catch on in the civil service, it often comes down to a lack of integration with existing systems. Anthropic may be able to compete with CoPilot as the assistant of choice, but there is little chance of displacing Microsoft on the base layer, so it’s best to pitch on that level.

Other stands demonstrated multi-agent systems, how Claude might be used in life sciences labs, and how it is being rolled out in schools. For the latter, Anthropic has a partnership with Denver-based MagicSchool AI. Only a handful of schools in the UK are using its products, but the company uses Claude to serve several million users in the US.

And then there was the chance to use a Poetry Camera, a viral Kickstarter project that uses Claude to compose poetry based on images. This had nothing to do with policy, but it was fun to try. Even if I did think the sonnet it made me about the ceiling of Banqueting House was a bit naff.

All in all, it was an interesting combination of a proud display with a softly-softly approach. A contradiction in some ways, but one that feels suited to the brand. Perhaps – to break my rule of never using this particular adverb since it’s been overused by LLMs – it was a sign they are quietly confident.

Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to reply to this email or DM me.

🥣 Congratulations to Granola on becoming a Unicorn after its latest funding round. I interviewed Chris Pedregal back in late 2024, when we talked about the (then mostly theoretical) idea of an AI workspace, big companies versus startups, and the importance of writing for thinking.

🦄 Frontier Tower and the Unicorn Mafia are teaming up to host a two-week ‘Agents in the Wild’ build sprint, culminating in a demo night on 14th April. Full details and the application form are here.

💡 Thank you to Tom Bristow of The Morning Intelligence for his help getting me into the event featured in today’s edition. If you haven’t already, do sign up for his daily briefing newsletter on AI in the UK.

📴 Pilots are underway in the UK testing different approaches to social media restrictions for under-16s.

🧬 Edith Heard, leader of the Francis Crick Institute, says “everyone should be worried” about investment in basic science amid pressure to focus on applied research, in an interview with Frances Jones for Research Fortnight.

🍻 If you’ve been following the drama over alleged AI usage in Matt Goodwin’s new book, you can watch him debate the matter with tonight on GB News. There’s even a viewing party happening in Westminster.

🏛️ I will be in DC for the next few weeks, so the newsletter may come out at a slightly different time and I’ll hopefully be bringing you a few relevant tidbits from the other side of the pond. If there’s someone you think I should meet out there, get in touch.