Where did the tech-optimistic MPs go?
What I learned from one day in Westminster.
Good morning, and best of luck to anyone facing today's Tube Strike.
What do you get when British innovation meets Nvidia’s top open source models? Meet Jupiter — a UK LLM, developed by London startup Locai Labs. It's built by post-training on Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 models to give it British language, knowledge and humour. There is even a Welsh version. All its training data is public and there is no Chinese open source in sight. Jupiter gives UK organisations a new sovereign reasoning model with frontier performance that can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud — and it’s trained for maximum performance on agentic tasks.
Happening Today 📆
The big question: How to get Britain growing? Politicians from Rachel Reeves to the Green Party's Adrian Ramsay will be giving their views at the National Growth Debate in Westminster.
Ban chat: MPs on the Education Committee will ask reps from Meta, TikTok, Snap and Roblox about the potential harms to children from algorithms, addictive features and exposure to online abuse. They'll also be asking for views on a potential ban on social media for under-16s and the alternatives.
On that note: The Lords once again comfortably outvoted the government in favour of a social media ban for under 16s yesterday afternoon. Amendments by Lord Nash to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill passed by 284 votes to 158. It means the Bill will continue "ping pong" between the Lords and the Commons. The government will, however, ban phones in schools following a last-minute change to the Bill. Until now, ministers have insisted that guidance was enough.
In today's edition for paid subscribers:
🥀 Where did Labour's tech-optimistic MPs go?
🚫 UK tech execs are preparing "exit strategies" in case their AI provider restricts access