What to watch as Parliament returns
Sovereignty everywhere + political techlash
Happy Monday and welcome back. I mainly spent the weekend digging for worms, not because I have the diet of a badger, but because it keeps the children entertained for two minutes. Today is the first paid edition, but you get another 30 days free if you upgrade by the end of today.
Sky-high energy costs, little compute and a lack of funding — the UK doesn’t have the ingredients to develop its own LLMs right now, but London startup Locai Labs has found an ingenious way to repurpose the best open source models into a UK sovereign LLM. Meet GB1 — it doesn’t train on your conversations, uses licensed data, and is powered by renewable energy. UK fusion pioneers First Light are among the organisations already using it and there’s much more to come.
Happening This Week 📆
The House of Lords will talk about AI's impact on employment at 2:30pm today, led by Labour peer Luciana Berger.
On Tuesday the Crime and Policing Bill returns to the Commons for MPs to vote on the Lords' chatbot amendments. It will then "ping-pong" back to the Lords on Thursday. The government will table an amendment to make tech executives criminally liable if their platforms fail to remove intimate images. AI minister Kanishka Narayan also gives evidence on Tuesday to the Foreign Affairs Committee on tackling disinfo from hostile states.
On Wednesday the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill is back in the Commons, which includes the Lords' amendment banning social media for under-16s. The latest research from Australia suggests almost two-thirds of under-16s are still on social media, four months after the ban.
On Thursday, MPs will talk about the impact of tech on children's development, while there is also a debate on the NHS' Federated Data Platform with Palantir. The Lords will ask about data centres' impact on net zero targets.
Also in Westminster: The GovTech Summit takes place on Thursday, with speakers including Alexander Depledge, Nigel Toon and David Willetts.
See you there: The Sovereign AI Unit launches at Wayve's HQ on Thursday evening. Join us the next morning at 10am for an online panel and Q&A which includes the unit's ventures lead Will Busby.
In today's edition for paid subscribers:
👀 Sovereignty everywhere, elections and a political 'techlash' — what to watch as MPs return.
🧪 AISI tests Mythos, regulators and banks worry about its cyber risks.
🐌 UK firms are using AI to cut costs, rather than drive growth, a major PWC study shows.
👩💻 Latest job moves