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

6. My thoughts are with the officials, many who are undergoing a second MoG change in only a couple of years. This presents a big talent flight risk and will make efforts to attract and retain the very best all the more difficult.

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

5. No 10 have assembled a great AI unit and tech team to address that, and their work continuing will be especially important

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

4. Spreading the AI brief across multiple departments will allow for some important areas to be prioritised, but it also strengthens the need for an effective No 10 AI operation, that can adjudicate between departments that end up in disagreement with one another.

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

3. Lots of focus right now on structure, but people will matter above all else. What DSIT managed to do when it comes to attracting exceptional talent across research, AI, and entrepreneurship is exceptionally rare. Cabinet Office and DBIST should internalise what has been done here.

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

2. There is also a fantastic chance for Rt. Hon. Jonathan Reynolds MP to immediately signal that he is seizing the opportunities of our tech future, and catalyse the confidence of a sector driving growth and investment in the country. The super dept pecking order will be brutal.

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

1. Give the Cabinet Office AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan MP, real authority to drive through the most ambitious work. This links to Tom Loosemore's point in the piece about ensuring that you have 'political muscle in charge of digital infrastructure '.

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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

Generally speaking, if your answer is a MoG, you’re asking the wrong question. My general view is that it comes down, most of the time, to the people. Whitehall rarely takes this question seriously.

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

5.) You will see an immense flight of the best people if this goes ahead. Folks don't want to spend 6-12 months awaiting new DG groups to be designed, when they want to urgently make a difference when it comes to some of the most important challenges that the world faces.

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

4.) But that gets fixed from an effective No10 that can exercise authority over differing departments, not a 'super department' that would end up running into similar coordination problems. And also better people/leadership! Focus on that, not 12 months on org charts.

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

4.) Where DSIT doesn't own those levers, there is a lot of room for improvement. This problem will compound as the societal impact of AI build.

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

3.) This is a crude heuristic, but imo on AI, DSIT is performing well in areas where it owns the levers, such as novel compute procurement, funding of novel research, SovAI, AISI, etc.

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

2.) You don't get critical institutional innovation like AISI emerging through a 'beefed up' (ie unfocused) department - AISI only could have emerged through DSIT. The moment we are in demands urgency, creativity, and effectiveness. I don't see how a 'super department' delivers this.

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

1.) Some parts of DBT are on course to be really helpful on AI (e.g. Global Talent Taskforce, UK Export Finance). *But* these are areas where incentives are broadly already aligned and 'join-up' might actually do more damage than good.

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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

3.) This year, we have already had two letters from Cab Office (March) and Chancellor (May) telling departments they need to buy British, especially for steel, energy, shipbuilding, and AI 4.) I can't speak for the other sectors, but I know that these directions aren't exactly 'unblockers'

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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

That's fair - probs the wrong analogy. Fintech a much better one! The difference with Paypal Mafia I was referring to was the ecosystem of angel investing etc that emerged where winners would aggressively invest back into their sectors. We haven't crossed that event horizon in UK just yet imo.

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

Once you have picked the race, govt has to work out how to incentivise the ecosystem to help support one another. An exam question I am mulling over is 'how do we create the UK's own version of the Paypal mafia?'

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

My general view is we should 'pick races not horses'. Pick a small number of niches (e.g. AI chip design) and go all in on developing an ecosystem around these companies The industrial strategy fails to do this imo because the 'key sectors' amount to most of the UK economy.

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

The second risk is cultural. In govt, it is very hard to fund things outside of a 'fair and open competition'. It makes your business case much harder to get through. Throw the kitchen sink at this. Big speeches. Letters to senior officials. Promote best practice. Flood the zone with this message.

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

But if you want to do this at the level of the industrial strategy, this requires going much further on issues around pay, paths to promotion, and creating a work environment that is semi-functional.

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

You need to actually bring in the expertise into govt if you want to make 'opinionated bets'. This can be done. In SovAI, we drafted in one of the UK's leading young experts in AI for drug discovery, helping to push through critical work on OpenBind's AI for drug discovery datasets openbind.uk

openbind.uk

Home | openbind.uk

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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

This data will look very different in 12 months time. Supply chains are becoming more heterogenous. Export controls will have a material impact (though just how much is unclear). Also going to do the normie thing and say Claude Code was a big help in spotting these narratives and building charts.

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

What is quite remarkable is how rapid Nvidia's transition to Blackwell series is. By Q3 2025, Blackwell chips account for the vast majority of Nvidia's compute shipments. Hopper is a thing of the past. Again, demonstrating just how strong demand is.

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

This chart demonstrates the impact of such a tax over time. Price performance diverging between NVIDIA’s Chinese and non Chinese outputs again is a major theme of why China has become relatively compute poor.

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

Interesting to see just how sharp the H20 cliff was. That's an 85% collapse in a single quarter when export restrictions tightened. Will be intriguing to see what happens in a world of more relaxed export controls.

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

The China Compute Tax Chinese AI labs are paying orders of magnitude (4x) more per unit of compute than the rest of the world. Nvidia's H20 (the China-compliant chip) costs $80,230 per H100-equivalent vs $20,176 globally. Now that export controls are relaxed, the tax drops from 4x to roughly 1.2x

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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 potentially has big policy implications if it continues to innovate + scale: - Could genuinely enable middle power collaboration, rather than vague 'shared sovereignty' notions on table now - Creates jurisdictional nightmares with 'no clear off switch' epoch.ai/gradient-upd...

epoch.ai

How far can decentralized training over the internet scale?

Decentralized training over the internet promises to scale training to the limits of the internet.

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

Thanks! Will read and get back to you with some reflections!

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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

So Wang’s framing here is trying to explain why the US can’t seem to build things, and China has such supremacy in doing so. Dictatorship vs democracy doesn’t explain that imo. I really recommend reading Breakneck if you haven’t as it will explain China infrastructure strategy a lot better than I!

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

Thanks! I had my own version of this in the works, framed as a “myth busting ideas on how to get things done in govt”, but may go back to the drawing board a bit with the framing based on The Discourse

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

Thanks for sharing - hope you’re well! I thought it was worth trying to flesh out further as there is deffo something in the argument, but I didn’t feel it got to the heart of what I’d observed in govt

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

The el-Fattah example is imo a red herring, and more of an example of a govt that is more legalistic/procedural than others. I've written in more detail about to what extent the UK is the 'lawyerly society' in a Substack post attached. ENDS tomwestgarth.substack.com/p/is-britain...

tomwestgarth.substack.com

Is Britain the Lawyerly Society?

Dan Wang’s new book is timely and erudite. Parallels of the US 'lawyerly society' to the UK exist, but maybe not for the reasons that you think.

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

Most people I spoke with in this No10 admin lamented that they were constantly fire fighting, & didn’t have the space to think about how to fix big problems. There are ofc big structural reasons for this, but the v best people find the space. They don’t talk about imaginary levers, they create them.

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

Nevertheless, it isn’t necessarily the case this means that a ‘Stakeholder State’ wins - other powerful forces can. The Stakeholder State didn’t rally for cutting winter fuel payments, unless you count HMT as a Stakeholder. This speaks to a wider paralysis amidst no Centre direction.

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

@pollymackenzie.bsky.social's substack makes this point well. This govt has not consciously chosen which political battles to fight. Combine that with a tendency to centralise, we are in a place where throughout government, ‘everything is a priority’, so nothing is.

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

The core of the issue I take with the Ovenden piece, is that this is a particularly acute problem when the government doesn’t have a clear sense of what it wants, the clear trade-offs that it is willing to accept as a result. Which stakeholders are you willing to piss off for extended periods.

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