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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

I'm in the @financialtimes.com, discussing what it might take for the new DSIT Machinery of Government changes to work. Lots of very thoughtful commentary in the piece from folks that understand what it takes to drive change in government. Some further thoughts from me below 🧵

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Ed Bithell @edbithell.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Kanishka Narayan's appointment is a really positive development - he is fantastically capable and credible on AI. Key questions: what levers he will have in his new role, as well as whether HMG keep excellent teams in AISI, No 10 etc, well-empowered in the new structure

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

MoG change now would be a disaster. Some takes as someone who has recently worked on AI in govt 🧵

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

On procurement nod in Burnham speech: 1.) 10% of tender weighting for central govt is already committed to social value 2.) Contractors have mixed views to say the least... worth reading @re-state.bsky.social's public sector survey of where it does and doesn't succeed re-state.co.uk/publications...

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

This is a notable break from orthodoxy that guides thinking within the British state. But it is necessary in order for the UK to compete globally and restore sovereignty There are a few challenges that this poses. What are they, and how can govt respond? www.theguardian.com/business/202...

theguardian.com

‘I’m picking winners’: UK business secretary takes activist approach to economic growth

AI evangelist Peter Kyle wants to scale up businesses, attract overseas investors and look out for UK’s poorer regions

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

50 papers published at Neurips 2025 (one of the three major global ML conferences) have AI hallucinations. Another example of how institutions need to evolve the tooling they have to spot pollution of the knowledge commons

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Had fun pouring through some of the great data from @epochai.bsky.social's new AI Chip Sales Tracker It illustrates a bifurcating global supply chain and new cost leaders emerging 🧵 epoch.ai/data/ai-chip...

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Jason Sinclair @jsinclair.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

Politicians: don't use AI to make your maps.

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Extremely exciting day for open science. Another reason to be bullish on UK AI. Boltz, a startup that emerged out of MIT to be at the frontier of small molecule and protein design, has moved to London. I hear cases like this from a few founders, often a mix of fundamentals (talent)+personal.

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M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

A heck of a chart: in every single one of the 10 major US cities that built the most housing between 2017 and 2023, rents for older, existing units fell—often by quite a bit.

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

Decentralised training of AI, where thousands of small datacenters, or individual consumers, pool their spare compute over the internet, is 20xing in scale a year. But this is nowhere near the scale of leading AI infra projects or non-AI decentralised projects. Great piece by @epochai.bsky.social

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

V good thread. IMV what’s double damning about the Ovenden piece is that you could write a thousand pieces about how Whitehall could run better, but absolutely none of them would run through “why should the diplomatic service care about a British citizen in an authoritarian jail?”

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

I have a few thoughts on the Stakeholder State and the piece by Paul Ovenden. I disagree with the extent of emphasis on stakeholders, but the more dismissive engagement on this app misses that a Strong Stakeholderism does exist, and has placed particular constraints on a govt that lacks direction 🧵

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Brilliant appointment. Jade has done exceptional work in government through AISI, and with her background in VC and frontier AI from the very beginning, she’s exactly the sort of person you want helping the UK prepare for the AI era

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

Are you a UK AI academic that wants to be GPU rich this summer? The Sovereign AI Unit has a call out for high ambition proposals in our core priority areas. Apply by July 7th! www.gov.uk/government/p...

gov.uk

Sovereign AI AIRR launch opportunity: call for researchers

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James O'Malley @jamesomalley.co.uk · 30/04/2025

This from @tomwestgarth.bsky.social on the emerging "progress" scene makes for interesting reading – and includes a mention of our podcast! tomwestgarth.substack.com/p/join-the-u...

tomwestgarth.substack.com

Join the UK Progress Idea Machine

Momentum is building around a new movement trying to revive the UK. We describe who they are, what is missing, and how you can help.

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

There is a growing community dedicated to unlocking U.K. progress and abundance. Come to the next TxP to hear from organisations such as ARIA, Centre for British Progress, Nucleate, Inference Magazine, Digital Frontier, and Project Europe! lu.ma/fuf590zb?loc...

lu.ma

TxP: The UK Progress Idea Machine · Luma

Join us at Wayve for a showcase of organisations working to unlock UK progress! Momentum is growing amongst a community of ambitious young folks in the UK.…

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

This prompts an interesting discussion about how these tools may soon be cultural artifacts. Things like BBC historical video archives aren’t just great for understanding evolving values, but changing production techniques etc. Will compute costs eat these cultural phenomena?

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Wondering if there are any DJs (especially female/non-binary DJs) in my tech policy network that would be interested in spinning some plates at the next TxP event. 🎧 🎶 Dm me if interested!

media.tenor.com

bernie sanders is wearing a jacket and glasses and says `` i am once again asking ''

ALT: bernie sanders is wearing a jacket and glasses and says `` i am once again asking ''

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

One of my favourite public speakers making such elegant observations about one of my favourite films.

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

I’d love for the BBC to commission Hannah Fry to do a 6 part series on AI in 2025. She’s such an incredible science communicator, and now is the time for a big public dialogue on the technology.

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

And ultimately much of the work we wrote about is attempting to break away from a model of R&D that is hierarchical and target-driven. First sc from NNP biotech, second sc from the first NNP

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

So Chinese company Deepseek released their latest frontier grade LLM. Some astounding context worth repeating: -They only used 2000 GPUs on a budget of around $6m. This level of capability requires normally around a 16k GPU cluster -Deepseek is literally a project ran by a Chinese hedge fund!

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Excellent post about the recent OpenAI o3 results on ARC (& other benchmarks). I don't know how @natolambert.bsky.social manages to write these so quickly! I highly recommend his newsletter. www.interconnects.ai/p/openais-o3... I am (more slowly) writing my own take on all this, coming soon.

interconnects.ai

o3: The grand finale of AI in 2024

A step change as influential as the release of GPT-4. Reasoning language models are the current big thing.

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Great discussion including @pahlkadot.bsky.social and @andrewgreenway.bsky.social on success stories in state capacity in the U.K. One for the Bluesky Heads ™️ I think open.substack.com/pub/statecra...

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Why is there a lot of disagreement amongst economists about AI productivity forecasts? This article suggests differences in assumptions around speed of adoption, and if this adoption is concentrated to a small number of sectors.

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Rory Byrne @rory.bio · 06/12/2024

I would greatly appreciate submissions and shares of this, to help us motivate funders to support open source toolmaking for academic science. 🙏 #neuroskyence #neuroscience #neuroai #chemsky #compchem #compbio #hpc #machinelearning #ai

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Exciting initiative. Two relevant points: 1.) Gaps in tooling are seen as a key blocker to improved capabilities + adoption. 2.) Another example of philanthropic orgs backing AI for R&D.

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Tom Westgarth @tomwestgarth.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

This looks v interesting. The diffusion of technology is often constrained by poor software tools. An under-explored policy question is how to create the right conditions/incentives for quality tools to be developed and scaled.

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