Letters XI: UK AI Edition

Dear friends of SoTA,

Welcome to the eleventh edition of SoTA Letters, focused on what “sovereign AI” actually means in practice. Following the US government’s overnight suspension (and subsequent restoration) of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 access for “all foreign nationals” — a category including most of our readers — we set out to explore how the renting versus ownership debate manifests for the founders and researchers actively building British AI capability.

We’ve sourced letters from teams building sovereign capability across the AI stack, along with the Sovereign AI Fund and ARIA within government. Our letter-writers disagree on whether sovereignty, strategic autonomy and leverage means infrastructure, models, mathematics, energy or minerals; a debate this edition seeks to stage.

We also share some updates from SoTA, including our recent events, the Operations Manager we’re looking for, and our new Commission on Intermittent Abundance with Rivan.

With this edition, SoTA Letters surpasses 150 Letters, 10,000 subscribers and 150,000 direct reads — a readership of scientists, engineers and technologists but also founders, funders, policymakers and operators.

1. Sovereign AI Starts with Sovereign Infrastructure, James Regan (Oriole Networks)

2. Training a Frontier Sovereign Model on British Soil, Alistair Pullen (Cosine)

3. There Is No AI Race Without an Energy Race Underneath It, Alan Chan (Fuse Energy)

4. The Challenge of Digital Sovereignty, Max Buchan (Valarian)

5. Don’t Just Build for Britain, Build for You, Joséphine Kant (Sovereign AI Fund)

6. Laying Tracks Towards the Future of Compute, Suraj Bramhavar (ARIA Scaling Compute)

7. Sovereignty on the Next Frontier, Dylan Rogers (Inherent Labs; former AISI)

8. Britain’s Sovereign AI Edge Is Scientific, Charlie Harris (Boltz; former Sovereign AI)

9. Commercial Fusion Will Power the Intelligence Age, David Kingham (Tokamak Energy)

10. Britain’s Industrial AI Opportunity, Sebastian Pattinson (Matta; SoTA’s Cyber-Physical Trust Frontiers Night)

11. How to Be an AI Superpower, Richard Pinch (former GCHQ; Erdős number of 3; SoTA letter-writer)

12. Slow, Not Scarce, Marco Zaccaria Di Fraia (Prism Labs)

Other relevant Letters we’ve previously published include:

• The Age of AI-Assisted Materials Discovery, Max Welling (CuspAI)

• Chemputation: Chemistry Programming & Molecular Discovery, Lee Cronin (Chemify; SoTA’s Self-Driving Labs Frontiers Night)

• Poisoning Attacks on LLMs, Alexandra Souly, Xander Davies, Robert Kirk and Abby D’Cruz (AISI Red Team)

• Building AI within Government, the Incubator for AI (SoTA’s Rewiring the State Frontiers Night)

• Provable Hardware Trust for AI, Connor Dunlop (Lucid Computing)

• On Symbolic World Models, AI Verification and an Addendum to the Bitter Lesson, Otter Quarks & Siméon Campos (Humanis; SoTA’s Cyber-Physical Trust Frontiers Night)

• From Patching Bugs to Proving Them Gone, Nora Amman (ARIA Safeguarded AI)

• A Tale of Three Computers, Oliver Johnson (University of Bristol)

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We’re hiring an Operations Manager to help run SoTA’s Hackathons, Commissions, Frontiers Nights and Debates, manage Fellowship logistics, and develop the systems and playbook that enable SoTA to scale. You’ll also build relationships with our partners across deeptech startups, AI labs, independent research organisations, academia, government and venture capital.

You’ll thrive here if you’ve run complex programmes end-to-end, build repeatable systems rather than holding everything in your head, and can proactively solve problems at pace. More details and application instructions here — sharing with your networks is much appreciated.

We recently held a Frontiers Night exploring what happens when AI agents not only consume knowledge, but also create, evaluate and broker it.

Through live demos and discussion, we deliberated how knowledge is valued, traded and trusted when participants are increasingly non-human; what replaces reputation when agents can be copied and forked at machine scale; how to establish provenance and trace claims back to sources; and what emerges when networks of knowledge-seeking agents collaborate or collude.

Industry was built on the assumption that energy is scarce. Cheap solar makes it abundant, but also intermittent. Our ongoing Commission is sponsored by London-based synthetic methane company Rivan, and asks how industry could be redesigned to exploit the intermittent abundance of renewables.

We welcome work on autonomous control, digital twins, electrical architecture, field robotics, fault detection and siting, among others — hacky prototypes as much as developed systems.

Grand Prize of £7,000 and a Prometheus Prize of £1,000. Read more and submit here by 18th September.

Previous editions of SoTA Letters can be found in the footer. If you enjoy reading, please consider donating or upgrading to a paid subscription.

We’d like to feature more quests climbing the untapped tech tree — branches of technoscience underexplored or underexploited relative to their potential — such as biomimetic sensing, enhanced weathering, thermal batteries, in-orbit manufacturing, or whole-organ banking.

Technical explainers and engineering stories with a clear thesis for the futures they can unlock are always welcome. Contact us at letters@ilikethefuture.com.

Ad astra,

Jamie & Matvey

The Society for Technological Advancement

Write to the Society for Technological Advancement at letters@ilikethefuture.com.

SoTA Letters X

SoTA Letters IX

SoTA Letters VIII

SoTA Letters VII

SoTA Letters VI

SoTA Letters V

SoTA Letters IV

• Trust Everything, Everywhere

• Defeating Entropy

• Robot Rave

• Human Augmentation

• Embodied Intelligence

• Weather Control

• Rebooting State Capacity

• Materials Discovery (Upcoming)

• Rewiring the State

• Self-Driving Labs

• Forecasting

• Cyber-Physical Trust

• Space

• Intermittent Abundance (Ongoing)

• Minimal-Shot Autonomy

• Whole-Brain Emulation