Hello friends,

Well it looks like we’re getting a new Prime Minister here in the UK. This will be the 6th PM in the past 7 years which makes you wonder if this has become an impossible job, a role that no one can fulfil. To get elected is a personality contest and the prize is to be villainised and targeted by a relentlessly negative media with whatever story they think will get the most clicks that day.

It's disappointing. It's frustrating. It's embarrassing. It's becoming... normal. Sigh.

Both of us know how a change in leadership can create disruption and confusion in the UK’s public sector, we’ve seen it first hand. Thrashing priorities kill momentum and motivation. We need sustained focus and investment to tackle big challenges like energy, global warming… and the future with AI. How can we tackle these challenges with such turmoil in government? But Charles did enjoy Private Eye’s very punny “Coup, What A Scorcher! Britain Sheds A Keir” podcast title this week.

​Writing in his substack Walter Pasquarelli, who leads advisory and editorial programmes at The Economist Group, says that “Sir Keir’s government built more AI policy machinery in 18 months than any of its predecessors managed in a decade”. He isn’t clear, and neither are any of the rest of us, what a new PM will do with it all.

After last week’s London Tech Week, this week it’s been the turn of London Climate Action Week. With a certain irony, a talk about the dangers of extreme heat was cancelled because of extreme heat. In all, around 10 events seem to have been cancelled; a nightmare for the organisers. It is, to coin a phrase, too darn hot.

Charles was, against all advice, in London all day Wednesday because his government client’s office has aircon. His journey home was genuinely hilarious.

Luckily for Charles his wonderful wife kept him laughing via text and, since she grew up in Kenya and is used to hot climes, had also done a sterling job of keeping their ancient house at a vaguely sane temperature.

Have a lovely week!

Hannah & Charles

What’s Hannah reading this week?

This week I'm in Austria where I gave the opening keynote at the OWASP Global AppSec conference. My trademark “relentless positivity” seemed to be well received but I couldn’t help but feel like the underlying vibe of the event was one of anxiety. Worries about job security, worries about the speed and automation of cyber attacks and worries about the new attack vectors we’re expected to defend against.

All valid concerns, all happening at once. All because LLMs are getting really damn good at this stuff.

I wish I had better answers. Concrete solutions to offer when people ask me for advice. I wrapped up my keynote by saying that no one is going to hand us a solution and that as a community we are going to have to roll up our sleeves and start figuring it out.

This was my first OWASP event and I will absolutely be returning, if there’s a group of people capable of leading the way it is this community.

There were two talks at the event that I wanted to share with you this week. Bar Kaduri, Head of Research at Capsule Security gave a fantastic talk about how Agentic Browsers are reintroducing some of the “old” mostly solved problems in web security. Looking back at the original OWASP top 10 application security risks, Bar explained how we have created many of the same or similar challenges, but this time with agents.

Quoting Simon Willison’s Lethal Trifecta for AI Agents Bar urged architects to make sure you avoid this dangerous design pattern.

The lethal trifecta of capabilities is:

• Access to your private data (tools or applications your agent browser has access to)
• Exposure to untrusted content (pretty much any website could include invisible prompt injection)
• The ability to externally communicate in a way that could be used to steal your data

I also enjoyed “Teaching AI Agents Like Guidedogs” by Bodhisattva Das. If we think about guide dogs as autonomous agents we can draw some parallels with how their training and assessment is carried out and tap into over a century of practice. Bodhisattva talked about “intelligent disobedience”, the ability for the guide dog to make a judgement that directly disobeys the instructions of its owner. For example, do not walk into the street if there is a lorry coming, no matter what your owner says. We need agents that can be reliably proven to “intelligently disobey” even in extreme conditions like a noisy multi-threaded context with conflicting instructions.

The take away from Bodhisattva’s talk was that if we use this model for assessing AI Agents then most of them should not be allowed to act autonomously, they have not proven that they can be trusted at that level. You can read more about the methodology, or contribute to the project. ​

There wasn’t a lot of time for reading this week but I have been diligently waiting for more news on the release of Fable and Mythos. Unsurprisingly some of the cyber focussed AI builders from Asia have jumped on the opportunity launching “mythos-like” AI models with the benefit that they cannot be cut off by the US government. Tech crunch reported on the announcements from Japanese Sakana AI and Chinas 360.

In contrast to the ridiculous practice of tokenmaxxing ThoughtWorks have provided advice on token budgeting for new features and products. As we know, long term support and maintenance of a new application is frequently under estimated and now that much of that work will be done by agents we need to factor in the cost of that i.e. the token budget.

What's Charles reading this week?

At a conference last year I got into a conversation with someone who had seen me talk about AI and climate, and wanted to tell me that I was wrong to worry. That’s not particularly unusual if you talk about climate change, but this chap’s argument, which he earnestly believed, was that AI was humanity’s rightful heir and if creating it brought about the destruction of the human race that was not only ok, but actually a good thing. It’s one of those logical fallacy arguments where each step kind of makes sense, until you reflect on it for maybe a minute and realise it’s completely bonkers.

I’d “forgotten” about this conversation, by which I mean I’d deliberately tried to erase it from my brain, until a friend and colleague suggested I listen to this podcast, and during my unexpectedly long train journey on Wednesday I did so. It turns out this idea has a name, AI successionism, and it’s a lot more prevalent and popular in certain circles than you might think. I understand how you get there. If you are working at breakneck speed on AI in a foundational lab with scant regard for safety or the implications of your work, having a lofty sounding goal might make it easier to sleep at night. But eeek! As well as being an eye-opening listen, the podcast does a great job of highlighting why the thinking behind it is much, much older than you might imagine.

In my own latest podcast, I interviewed Abby Bangser — Principal Engineer at Syntasso and Team Topologies Advocate — for GOTO Unscripted’s State of the Art Series. Abby is a fantastic guest, and we had a wonderful, wide ranging conversation somewhat focussed on how internal developer platforms (IDPs) are maturing and adapting to the explosion of generative AI. While coding assistants provide productivity gains for individual developers, she argues that the next major frontier is viewing AI agents as primary consumers of platforms. By giving autonomous agents access to secure, deterministic platform APIs, organisations can provide the necessary compliance guardrails and data privacy hooks.

Midjourney, who pioneered consumer AI image generation, were briefly big news but never really built a product and are now mostly left behind by multi-modal models from the big labs. In response, the firm is trying to disrupt medical imaging which is… unexpected. It isn’t my area of expertise, to put it mildly, but the idea is that you can do frequent, cheap and (apparently) harmless full-body scans to look for changes, reducing or avoiding the need for expensive, invasive procedures. My tech journalist BS detector went nuts as I read the announcement blog, major Elizabeth Holmes vibes, but if it works yay, I guess. There is real science behind it. The Register’s Brandon Vigliarolo points out that it relies on Fullbody Ultrasound Computational Tomography which isn’t new, and Butterfly confirmed in its own press release that it provided the 40 ultrasound imaging modules for the Midjourney Scanner. “There's some irony in Midjourney's failure to mention its partner: The company has faced lawsuits claiming it used copyrighted works without permission to train its AI image generation model,” Vigliarolo writes. I also enjoyed the choice of Felix Rösch’s “On an Evening, At the Lake”, rather than an expected AI-slop soundtrack, to the accompanying video, which will I imagine boost Rösch’s play streams.

An earlier draft of this newsletter suggested that if you are thinking of buying a new Apple device you might want to do it sooner rather than later because prices were likely to go up but, unfortunately, they already have by a lot. MacRumors has a list of before/after prices for US readers at least. The reason is that memory chip makers are giving priority to high spec memory used in AI data centres, which means that in the last couple of months supply and hence pricing for the memory used in consumer electrics has been squeezed. And obviously Apple couldn’t possibly reduce its margins!

The BBC’s Francisco Velasquez reports that Musk lost his trillionaire status on Tuesday, as “technology stocks broadly tumbled, fuelled by growing doubts over the long-term profitability of artificial intelligence”. Meanwhile leaked financial docs obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron, show OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and Codex, is losing billions of dollars a year as it gets ready to IPO.

Given that it is London Climate Action Week it seems remiss not to mention that OpenAI and established silicon supplier Broadcom have announced a new chip called Jalapeño, designed specifically for large language model inference in data centres. Broadcom says that this ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) was designed from scratch for LLM inference, based on “detailed insights” from the company’s conversations with researchers at OpenAI, and that the chip’s development was informed by OpenAI’s own roadmap for future models and products. The design and production of the chip took nine months.

In general, specialised hardware is better for the environment than running workloads on generic CPUs and GPUs. OpenAI claims “early testing shows that Jalapeño will deliver performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art,” but has given no details thus far.

Meanwhile Jeremy Hsu reports for Ars Technica on an advanced press briefing from IBM, who have new chip architecture that can integrate nearly 100 billion transistors on a chip the size of a human fingernail — nearly twice the transistor density of the company’s previous generation of chip technology. Hsu writes that Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, described the new chip technology as “pointing to a future where computing becomes significantly more powerful without a corresponding increase in energy”.

Film news now. Earlier this month, director Kane Parsons, who helmed the highest-grossing film to date for studio A24 with Backrooms, said, “If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would. Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.” I’m not a fan of horror as a genre, but even I am impressed by A24, the film studio behind Heretic and Everything Everywhere All At Once, as well as Backrooms. Now they and Google have struck an AI research partnership that will see the independent studio work with Google’s DeepMind unit to develop new AI-powered technologies for filmmakers. It’s fair to say that fans of the studio have not been impressed. Several fans on the likes of X and Reddit have absolutely slated A24. The r/A24 subreddit is in full meltdown mode, as multiple posts have appeared in the past 24 hours featuring people cancelling their membership in AAA24, a subscription service whose benefits include a ticket to every A24 release.

Meanwhile Amazon’s studio has dropped a nearly-complete and apparently very good movie about Sam Altman, after another part of Amazon did deals with OpenAI. Just another of those little coincidences, I’m sure.

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