Looks like toast

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

Welcome back to the only newsletter that means exactly what it says when demanding the safe release of the sausages.

— Ed & Joe

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AI
Can we stop AI from becoming evil?

Researchers at the University of Oxford certainly seem to think so. They claim to have just found a way to stop open AI models from acquiring dangerous knowledge – and without turning them into clotpolls. The problem starts with: 

Open-weight models

Which are basically LLMs that anyone can download, improve or fiddle with like a wicked uncle. We’re talking the likes of Kimi-K2 and gpt-oss. 

Now, you glorious beasts, these open-weight models are indeed wunderbar for advancing scientific knowledge.

But creeps, thieves and murderers can tinker with them – the sort of people who make illegal content and whose very existence tilts you closer to supporting the death penalty.

Clearly, the old workaround isn’t working

Which basically involves building first, and adding in the safety filters after – which are programmed not to ingest and learn from certain evil things. 

But those filters can be removed or bypassed, as OpenAI said in their own paper. 

So the researchers built the safety features in from the start – and tried to teach it about all manners of sin: bioweapons, reverse genetics, virology. 25,000 academic papers worth of potential evil. 

It was 10x more effective

The fine-tuned models resisted learning evil better than previous iterations. 

All of which comes at a fine time. Researchers from OpenAI have warned that frontier AI models could help create biological weapons quite soon. 

And these open-weight models aren’t regulated. As soon as they’re released, the world’s evildoers can use them willy-nilly. 

IMMIGRATION
Labour is shooting Britain in the head

More than 50,000 migrants have arrived in Britain in small boats since January – that’s a 48% increase since the year before.

Labour is making it worse

According to the Migration Observatory, the number of migrants coming to our pale shores had been declining until Labour took charge, when the number started magically increasing again. 

Nearly 50% are from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Most of them are men, many traumatised by war, nearly all of whom were brought up in cultures that normalise honour killings (Iran), and child brides (Afghanistan, where 30% of women are married under the age of 18).

10% are from Albania – and as George Galloway noted, “there hasn’t been a war there since 1945.” 

This isn’t a strategic immigration policy

Because, according to the UN, 60% of adult migrants are illiterate. And even centrist fact-checkers admit that Afghans are statistically more likely to be convicted of a sexual assault than Britons. Shock horror from a country that banned secondary education for girls last year. 

Meanwhile, skilled migration is down because the government is making it harder for skilled people with degrees to come to the UK and help us rebuild our broken country. 

We need immigration of nerds

Because we have a skills crisis in this country – and we’re in the midst of a global arms race. 

We need data scientists, engineers, and world-leading computer scientists. 

Rather than having to spend a full £2 billion a year on asylum accommodation, imagine if we could redirect even a portion of that to help businesses bring the world's brightest minds to Britain?

ENVIRONMENT
It’s getting hot in here (so hot)

Water shortages caused by a series of heatwaves mean millions in England are under hosepipe bans. What on earth is going on?

The system can’t cope

Our nation’s water supply is decaying and outdated. 12% of it was built in the reign of Queen Victoria, begad!

Which might be why 19% of the water supply is lost due to leakage every year by water companies. 

They couldn’t give a damn

They continue to pay fat dividends to shareholders – a grand total of £85 billion since their privatisation. 

How could they care? 90% of English water companies are owned by foreign shareholders. 

As one researcher noted, “private equity investors have found innovative financial mechanisms for increasing investor returns that are unrelated to productive activity.”

So now the land “looks like toast”

According to a farmer in Herefordshire. Meanwhile, Norfolk farmers are struggling with low crop yields. 

According to a government study, England is on track to be short of 5 billion litres of water a day by 2055. 

We need a reset. 

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 💰️ 🏃 The rich really are fleeing. Whatever the Guardian tells you. According to Companies House data, there’s been a 40% increase in company directors changing their country of residence since last year. 3,790 company directors moved abroad, as opposed to the 2,712 who left the previous year. They’re mainly going to the UAE. Shock horror.

• 🤖 💷 HMRC’s just got challenged over its use of AI in handling R&D grant applications, which they scrutinise massively. Someone filed a Freedom of Information Request, demanding to see whether the tax collector was using AI to do it. HMRC refused to confirm or deny until a judge told them to stop being a tease and spit it out by the 18th of September. 

• 🔒️ 💼 Just 16% of businesses recruit ex-prisoners, which is baffling. But seriously: this coincides with a recent government report that found more than half of re-offending prisoners couldn’t find a job after leaving. 

• 🤔 💻️ British cyber-security teams really don’t trust AI, according to a government study. Cyber “red teamers” – the gentlemen pirates who find weaknesses in cyber defences – have failed to integrate AI into their services, considering AI’s capabilities “overstated”. Which is a serious problem, considering that AI-powered cybercrime is rising. 

• 🤑 🇬🇧 Want a loan for your startup? It’s coming. 69,000 startup loans worth £25,000 per founder will be available soon. Get applying, you glorious beasts, and help save this beautiful country from the depths of hell.