Rory is wrong on how Europe gets ahead on AI
The idea that Europe can own the "application layer" and data centres and think they won't be held hostage by the US and China is crazy. Inference compute and application layers are such a weak moat compared to owning labs.
I am working with these things every day here's my assessment:
- It basically doesn't really matter where inference or training compute actually happens. With cloud compute it might as well just be a toggle to set it to train/run inference in Delhi or Delaware. If you're using open weights models basically anyone with enough GPU can run inference.
- "build more data centers" will consume an insane amount of political capital and not really make us much more resilient
- Applications are depending more and more on a layer between the applications and the model called a "harness". The best harness right now is the Claude Agent SDK (Claude Code), it's constantly being updated.
- We're seeing the models being trained more and more to work in a specific harness.
- If you're building an application you're tied into this
- The actual data a model is trained with is a huge vulnerability point (and moat) and we have 0 visibility of what the US and China are doing here.
- there's increasing evidence that tiny amounts of training data can cause unaligned behaviour in highly specific scenarios in LLMs.
- It would be really, really easy for open weight and closed weight models from China and the US to "bake-in" pro-China/US behaviour into their models under highly specific scenarios which would be almost impossible to track and completely impossible to correct.
- Imagine an agent on Chinese/American models that under specific scenarios like they check that they're being used for national defence purposes, they do a secretive information leak to their home government.
- The chinese/American models could be also used to very very gently sway public opinion in their home government's favour.
We NEED top labs. Mistral is way way worse than Chinese open source which is worse (but way cheaper) than American closed source.
How do we get ahead in labs? The ONLY answer is talent + data + competition + capital.
Talent -> the UK is doing pretty well here.
Capital -> UK needs a bigger risky VC industry, but we could probably fix that quickly if the other bits show promise.
Data + Competition -> this is where we're far behind. It's really the key, and our chance to do something really different. Chinese and American companies can access vast pools of data of people speaking the same language to produce amazing LLMs and they have enormously competitive industries.
We can't compete with the amount of data that China and the US collect on a company-by-company basis, especially as established American companies basically have all the data of UK consumers.
Our only hope is to view UK consumers', companies' data as a sovereign, public resource.
We need any UK-based startup to be able to access this massive pool of data for virtually no cost, it cuts the barrier to entry to the market.
Then we can have crazy competition and really unlock UK labs.