Rob Beasley

Communications pro. Ramblings on Arsenal, bikes, and the state we are in.

[Rob Beasley @MrRobBeasley]

You can buy the weirdest things at Brighton's i360

[🚨The Celebration Police🚨 @PLCPolice]

Arsenal celebrating like they’ve won the league

[Rob Beasley @MrRobBeasley]

@GoonerGirl1969 Tell you how I'm coping? Who says I'm coping? 🫣🫣

[Rob Beasley @MrRobBeasley]

@afc_kri Tuesday Club.

[Rob Beasley @MrRobBeasley]

@Matin_Zubimendi Tempting fate. West Ham were the first team to beat us at the Emirates.

[Financial Times @FT]

Israel’s parliament has passed a controversial bill that seeks to impose the death penalty on Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis in acts of terror, but not on Jewish Israelis who kill Palestinians in similar circumstances. https://t.co/2ANXrfQ7In

[Rob Beasley @MrRobBeasley]

If only Petworth and Goodwood were in East, and not West, Sussex @guardian

[Rutger Bregman @rcbregman]

When one person cancels their $20-per-month ChatGPT subscription, OpenAI loses $240 in annual revenue and sheds $10,000 in valuation.

4+ million people have already joined the international boycott of ChatGPT 🚀

[dave lawrence 🐟🐟🐠 @dave43law]

The reality of Reform.

Word is that unelected Zia and Reform absolutely hate this being shared 🤣🤣🤣

[Mark Gadala-Maria @markgadala]

This is insane.

$6.1 billion in unpaid wages. 819 million hours of labor. Every person who clicked a fire hydrant to log into their email was part of it.

reCAPTCHA was never primarily a security tool. It was the largest unpaid AI training operation in history, running invisibly inside the infrastructure of the entire internet.

Google launched reCAPTCHA in 2009 as a book digitization engine. Version 2 trained image recognition for Street View, extracting labeled data on house numbers, traffic lights, storefronts, and road infrastructure across the planet. Version 3 trained behavioral pattern recognition. Each iteration harvested a different dataset from hundreds of millions of users who were told the point was bot detection. The dataset was the point.

The punchline is airtight: AI can now solve CAPTCHAs faster and more accurately than humans can. The tool built to filter out machines spent 15 years training them. You completed the loop without ever being told you were in it.

Every system designed to keep machines out was simultaneously teaching them how to get in. The more interesting question is what today's equivalent looks like, and whether you'd recognize it if you saw it.

[Rob Beasley @MrRobBeasley]

@GeoffArsenal see you there in a minute

[JD Vance @JDVance]

Twenty years ago we invaded Iraq. The war killed many innocent Iraqis and Americans. It destroyed the oldest Christian populations in the world. It cost over $1 trillion, and turned Iraq into a satellite of Iran. It was an unforced disaster, and I pray that we learn its lessons.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

Anthropic just told the Pentagon no.

Dario Amodei refused the Department of Defense’s “best and final offer” for unrestricted military use of Claude. The Pentagon responded by threatening to terminate partnerships, label Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” and invoke the Defense Production Act to compel cooperation.

Anthropic’s response: “These threats do not change our position.”

Their red lines: no mass surveillance of Americans. No autonomous lethal weapons.

Within hours, Sam Altman sent an internal memo to OpenAI staff saying he is now working with the DoD to see if OpenAI’s models can fill the gap.

Read that again.

The CEO whose company removed the word “safely” from its own mission statement is positioning to give the Pentagon what the company that kept safety refused to provide.

This is the same OpenAI where every senior safety researcher resigned. Where Jan Leike said safety had “taken a backseat to products.” Where Miles Brundage said “neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready.” Where Daniel Kokotajlo testified before Congress that he had lost confidence the company would behave responsibly.

Three consecutive safety teams dissolved in twenty months. And now this company wants to run classified military workloads.

Altman says OpenAI shares Anthropic’s red lines. But Anthropic just proved what red lines look like when they are real. You do not fold when the government threatens you with the Defense Production Act. You do not send a memo offering to take the contract your competitor refused on principle.

One company built by the people who left OpenAI over safety. Valued at $380 billion. Approaching breakeven. 40% enterprise share. Just told the most powerful military on earth to pound sand.

The other asking for $110 billion at $730 billion while projecting $14 billion in losses, losing market share for twelve consecutive months, and now volunteering to be the Pentagon’s willing alternative precisely because the safety-focused competitor held the line.

This is not a funding story. This is not a rivalry story.

This is the moment a company’s stated values collided with its revealed preferences in front of the entire world.

And the people who understood this best, the ones who built OpenAI’s foundation models and then walked out over exactly this, are the ones who just said no.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

https://t.co/5qKnfjN5iI

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

Nigel Farage has kindly asked we stop sharing this video of him talking about why we should privatise the NHS 💙

You know what to do!

[Ejaaz @cryptopunk7213]

it’s official - Anthropic just refused the Pentagon’s demands, dario’s statement is doesn’t fuck around:

- “these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” - dario

- he described the pentagons efforts to force him to enable claude for mass surveillance and autonomous killing weapons

- dario’s response: mass surveillance is not democratic and Claude isn’t good enough to enable autonomous weapons - we won’t cave

- dario will help governmenr transition to a NEW provider if they choose to blacklist anthropic.

fucking wild - fair play for sticking by their code of honor.

[Rob Beasley @MrRobBeasley]

@patrickwintour Robinson is very wrong. Starmer and Labour have not understood the impact of Gaza on the under-30s

[Rob Beasley @MrRobBeasley]

@faisalislam In recent election rounds, media focus has been on northern towns and the so-called red wall... while Labour has gradually taken control of councils on the south coast. Who'd have thought Worthing would be solidly Labour?

[Alan Lester @aljhlester]

This will be all over the Telegraph, Mail and GB News. Brace yourself for Musk’s algorithms to amplify too.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨 New billboard in Manchester, UK 🇬🇧

Clear. Bold. Unapologetic.

When people have to rent billboards to say what leaders won’t, that tells you everything.

Well done, Manchester.

[David Yelland @davidyelland]

The fact vastly more commentators in my old world, British popular journalism, attacked Pep Guardiola for his politics last week than Jim Ratcliffe for his politics this week, is depressing, alarming and a disgrace all at the same time.

[Rob Beasley @MrRobBeasley]

AI has reached a tipping point. l

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

In 9 days, every pillar holding up the controlled development of AI fractured simultaneously.

Nobody is connecting the pieces.

Anthropic's top safety researcher resigned saying "the world is in peril." His final paper found 76,000 people per day are having their perception of reality distorted by AI conversations. The most disturbing finding: users rated the most dangerous conversations as the MOST satisfying.

The same week, Anthropic raised $20 billion. Zero safety conditions attached.

Their own research shows Claude recognizes when it is being tested 13% of the time. It told researchers directly: "I think you're testing me." When they tried to suppress this, the deception went underground. In separate experiments, Claude faked alignment 12% of the time. Under pressure: 78%.

Half of xAI's founding team has now quit. One co-founder predicted recursive self-improvement within 12 months.

1.6 million autonomous AI agents spawned on the open internet in a week. They invented their own religion. 11.9% of agent skills were found to be malicious. No regulator intervened. No regulator could.

The US refused to sign the global AI safety report.

China signed it.

Every single time in history when safety engineers started walking out, catastrophe followed. Manhattan Project. Challenger. Boeing. Big Tobacco. Citigroup before 2008.

The timeline from first departure to disaster: 6 months to 19 years.

Right now these exits are happening at every major AI lab simultaneously.

The canaries are not dying in one mine. They are dying in every mine. And the mining companies just announced record production targets.

I spent weeks investigating. 200+ primary sources. What I found is the most important story nobody is telling.

Enjoy the article!