Goldilocks

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

London is getting driverless Ubers next spring after successful trials.

Apparently the AI drives "more cautiously than humans" and can work 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, without stopping for cigarette breaks or therapy.

The government says the driverless industry will create 38,000 jobs by 2035, which will be of great comfort to the 289,293 licensed taxi drivers in the UK.

STARTUPS
Rich Americans binge buy cheap British startups

Investors from our former colony are buying our woefully undervalued startups on the cheap. 

What’s going on? 

🌊 AlphaWave, one of the UK’s few publicly-traded semiconductor companies, was bought by its yank rival Qualcomm for £1.8 billion. 

💻 Quantum computing startup Oxford Ionics was bought by - yes, you guessed it - its American rival, IonQ, for £816 million. 

🧪 Spectris, a precision and testing equipment specialist, is apparently open to a £3.7 billion takeover from US private equity firm, Advent. 

This is concerning

Because we’ve got brilliant AI potential. 

Even the NVIDIA CEO said so. The UK, he said, is experiencing a “goldilocks” moment in terms of AI, calling Britain's AI ecosystem "really perfect for takeoff" and promising to invest more here.

But we’re letting it walk out the door.

Take AlphaWave. Here's a UK company with the kind of advanced chip technology that Britain needs to keep in-house to become an AI leader - and now it's about to become American-owned.

We’re pretty broke compared to the Americans, and money talks.

There are a few factors at play:

• A weak pound

• Woefully undervalued UK stock market, not helped by… 

• Anti-competitive financial regulations (hello, Tobin Tax).

All of which makes startups more likely to flee across the pond.

Here’s the rub: building the UK tech startup scene into a national superpower - as the Labour government wants to do - won’t be possible without strong domestic financial backing. 

It’s part of a wider trend

All our homegrown companies are leaving in search of better financial markets: Wise and Monzo are buying tickets for the New World. 

Others, like Deliveroo and Darktrace, have been gobbled up by fat American capitalists. 

If more companies leave, the UK startup scene’s value will deplete faster than that of a semi-literate hunk on the school football team. 

Then we’ll all be gobbled up, start saying “sidewalk” instead of “pavement” and writing “z” when an “s” is best.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Draw me like one of your French girls, James Cameron

London-based startup Stability AI - which lets users generate images via prompts - is getting sued by Getty Images for training its models on copyrighted photographs. 

What happened?

In their 78,000-page submission, Getty Images alleges:

• Stability AI’s copyrighted images still contain the Getty watermark

• They trained their model on images of abuse. 

• “A bunch of tech geeks… indifferent to any of the dangers or problems it presents,” said their lawyer. 

Stability AI fought back

The startup - of which Titanic director James Cameron is a board member - denied training its model on illegal images.

Most importantly, they argue, the legal case threatens the entire industry. 

This comes at an important time

Because the government is currently fighting the House of Lords over its AI bill, which would allow AI companies to train their models on copyrighted work unless artists explicitly say no. 

Even Elton John has weighed in, calling copyright protection an "existential issue" for artists and warning the government: "We will not back down and we will not quietly go away."

Let’s see who’s still standing after the trial concludes in a few weeks.

SOCIAL MEDIA
A happy day for Mark Zuckerberg (and his shareholders)

Social media advertising will make more money than traditional advertising this year. Which means Mark Zuckerberg can afford yet another brand advisor.

What happened? 

Content ad revenue will make more money than TV networks, cinemas and news companies this year, according to WPP Media. 

• That’s a 20% increase in revenue from ads, brand deals and sponsorships

• It’s predicted to double by 2030, making it worth £278.3 billion. 

• Which means the whole online advertising industry will be worth the same as the economy of South Africa.

It’s breaking the old order

Traditional media outlets rely on advertising. But with fewer viewers, they make less money. 

Which is why:

• ITV recently announced hundreds of job cuts.

• Channel 4 is creating TikTok content in a dedicated in-house studio. 

And Meta wants to automate the lot

By next year, Facebook's parent company plans to let brands create and target ads entirely using AI - no humans required.

The tech will handle everything from writing copy to creating images to choosing who sees the ads.

They say this will level the playing field for SMEs who can’t afford to pay ad agencies. 

But creative agencies aren't panicking - yet.

They're positioning themselves as the gatekeepers between AI tools and brands, arguing that strategy and storytelling can't be replicated by machines.

We’ll see. AI is already eating away at junior creative roles, and it’s still relatively early days.

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 🏘️ 📉 London property owners slash prices because non-doms are fleeing. According to researchers at Knight Frank, house prices in prime central London have declined 2.2% since the new rules came into effect, which forces non-doms to pay tax like everyone else, the poor lambs.

• ⚡️ ☢️ We’re building a nuclear power plant called Sizewell C. The government are pouring £14 billion into it, hoping to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, who wanted to build this back in 2009 when he was just a Brown-era advisor, said it was necessary if we want to achieve Net Zero, which will double electricity demand by 2050. 

• 🇬🇧 🏆️ Foreign investors think the UK is the best in Europe. Our green and pleasant land got 25% of all foreign direct investment (FDI) in Europe. The sad news? Despite being the best, we saw a 32% year-on-year decline in FDI in 2024. Germany and France followed close behind. Only Spain, Italy and (shock horror) Luxembourg recorded an increase in FDI. 

• 😱 🫠 We’re all stressed, according to a study by the London School of Economics. One in ten of us is even experiencing a “stress crisis”, apparently. Low income, debt, a chaotic NHS, insecure tenancies and high rent are all contributing. We’re as stressed as we were since the 2008 financial crisis. I felt this intuitively through conversations with my mother-in-law.  

• 🍎 🥱 Apple’s new product update was a bit boring because everyone expected they’d throw their hat into the AI ring. Instead, they just announced some software updates. The two main talking points were live translation for phone calls (cool) and an iOS facelift called “liquid glass” (transparent icons and menus) that got a lot of backlash. 

• 🔋 🤷 Energy companies are being paid to switch off their generators because the grid doesn’t have the capacity to store their electricity. Scotland’s biggest wind farm was paid £65 million last year to turn off 71% of the time. According to the National Electricity System Operator (NESO), this will cost the UK £8 billion a year by 2030 if we don’t increase capacity.