Charlotte’s Brain Tumour Journey
18.2.1997 – 24.2.2016
Diagnosis to death: 951 days
Before Charlotte died, we were sitting together when she turned to me and said:
“When I’m dead, take my YouTube channel down. No one will ever be interested in a girl with a brain tumour.”
At that point, she had around 4,000 subscribers.
After Charlotte died, Miles and I made the decision to keep her channel online. We continued uploading unseen footage, talking about Charlotte, and sharing updates about the charity.
Charlotte was one of the very first young people, back in 2014, to publicly document her brain cancer journey online.
Without ever realising it, she left Miles and me a legacy through all of that filming.
One day, I would love to see Charlotte’s channel reach 100,000 subscribers so that we could hold the Silver YouTube Button up to the sky and say:
“You did it.”
To date, Charlotte’s channel has been viewed more than 27 million times and now has over 93,600 subscribers.
If you are able to subscribe, we would be incredibly grateful. Not for us neither Miles nor I are YouTubers but for Charlotte, who lost her life to glioblastoma at just 19 years old.
Please RT With thanks
https://t.co/IVf4kxIlse
The CEO of Google DeepMind just admitted that if the decision had been his, we would've cured cancer before anyone ever used ChatGPT.
And that's not even the scariest thing he said on a recent interview.
Demis Hassabis is one of the most important people alive in AI.
He won the Nobel Prize last year for AlphaFold, the system that cracked the 50 year protein folding problem. 3 million scientists now use his tool. Almost every new drug being developed will touch it at some stage.
In a new interview, he was asked about the moment ChatGPT launched and Google went into "code red." His answer was one of the most revealing things any AI leader has ever said on the record:
"If I'd had my way, I would have left AI in the lab for longer. Done more things like AlphaFold. Maybe cured cancer or something like that."
Read that again.
The man running Google's entire AI division is publicly saying the commercial AI race we're all living through was a MISTAKE. That the industry got hijacked by a chatbot when it could have been solving the biggest problems in science and medicine.
His vision was simple:
Build AI slowly, carefully, like CERN. Use it to crack root node problems one at a time. Cancer. Energy. New materials.
Let humanity benefit from real breakthroughs while the foundational science was figured out over a decade or two.
Then ChatGPT dropped in November 2022 and everything changed.
Demis described what happened next as getting locked into a "ferocious commercial pressure race" that none of the labs can escape from. On top of that, the US vs China dynamic added geopolitical pressure.
The result is everyone sprinting toward products instead of breakthroughs, shipping chatbots while the scientific opportunity gets buried under marketing cycles and quarterly earnings.
But he's not saying progress isn't happening...
He's saying the progress got redirected away from the things that actually matter most.
And then it got even scarier:
Because when Demis was asked what he worries about with AI, he laid out two threats.
The first is what everyone talks about: Bad actors using AI for harm. Terrorist groups. Hostile nation states. Cyberattacks at scale.
But that's not the threat he's most worried about.
His second worry is AI itself going rogue. Not today's models. The models coming in the next two to four years as the industry enters what he calls "the agentic era."
Systems that can complete entire tasks autonomously. Systems that are increasingly capable and increasingly hard to control.
His exact words:
"How do we make sure the guardrails are put in place so they do exactly what they've been told to do, and there's no way of them circumventing that or accidentally breaching those guardrails? That's going to be an incredibly hard technical challenge if you think about how powerful and smart and capable these systems eventually get."
A Nobel Prize winner who runs one of the 3 most advanced AI labs on Earth just said publicly that within two to four years, we're entering a phase where AI alignment becomes a real problem, and the technical challenge of solving it is enormous.
And almost nobody is paying enough attention.
He called for international cooperation between labs, AI safety institutes, and academia to tackle the problem. He said this is the thing even the experts aren't thinking about enough.
He said the only way to get through the AGI moment safely is if everyone starts treating this with the seriousness it deserves.
Most AI CEOs give you careful PR answers about "responsible development" and move on.
Demis said something different...
He said the commercial race FORCED us into a premature deployment of a technology we barely understand, and the window to get alignment right before the next generation of agents shows up is two to four years.
If the man who built the system that might cure cancer is telling you he wishes it had happened first, maybe we should listen to what he says is coming next.
Please keep signing and sharing. We need to ensure the Government takes patient’s voices seriously. We need the Right to Try new treatments, repurposed treatments, treatments that deliver more time to live.
#cancer#braincancer#braintumourawarenessmonth#braincancerjustice
🚨My latest column for @thenerve_news : Keir Starmer has endorsed a false claim that the Green’s deputy leader Mothin Ali supports the Ayatollah. Here’s my take on the PM’s attack line and how it could backfire : “The Greens aren’t ‘extreme’, prime minister: they’re just behaving like Labour should”
@MothinAli@Keir_Starmer
https://t.co/IAWUnB8E82
Join me and over one million others in supporting a different model for open, independent journalism. Together we can help safeguard the Guardian’s future – so more people, across the world, can keep accessing factual information for free https://t.co/eCzkXccKNh
It’s extremely good that Anthropic has not backed down, and it’s siginficant that OpenAI has taken a similar stance.
In the future, there will be much more challenging situations of this nature, and it will be critical for the relevant leaders to rise up to the occasion, for fierce competitors to put their differences aside. Good to see that happen today.
Ok, Americans, I am beginning to realise how badly misinformed you are on UK politics so let’s blitz this.
1. There is NO “welfare” in Britain. There are specific allowances and support systems in place for the vulnerable and deprived, but we call this benefits/universal credit. If you asked for the “welfare centre” here no one would know what you meant. It depends massively on where you live and what your situation is.
2. The NHS is not “welfare”. It’s not “what poor people have to do”. The vast majority of people use it.
3. You can’t get benefits in the UK unless you are legally allowed to stay here, are established as unable to work, facing extreme poverty, or are actively looking for work. You’d be given a leaflet on applying for jobs.
4. You can’t get council housing (welfare housing) in the UK unless you have no funds to support yourself in the private market AND you are unable to house yourself on your wages/income. Often they will place you in temporary shared hostel housing , not your own place, especially if you don’t have kids. You don’t just get a “free house”.
5. No, illegal immigrants don’t qualify for anything. You’ll be denied assistance if you don’t have the correct documentation as a refugee, citizen, resident, etc. You can’t just turn up and get money and education.
6. We pay councils (like mini states) tax on top of our normal tax for residency in that area and they are responsible for a LOT of local services and funding decisions. Nothing to do with Keir Starmer.
7. You have councillors and MPs. Both are elected. The first are usually civil servants who know how to do things, the second are more career politicians. Sometimes you get a “angry at the government” idiot candidate as a councillor and you’re fucked because he’s a crook and out for himself.
8. No, the king can’t intervene in politics or change any laws. The last person who did was Edward VII in the 1900s and he was ordered to after an election/parliamentary ruling. He’s basically Melania Trump power wise.
9. No, we don’t all support the royalty. It’s mostly for tourist so and grandmas. No one really talks about them.
10. No, we aren’t overrun by Muslims. London, Birmingham and Bradford are large urban immigrant areas but 60 years ago the same rhetoric was about Irish people and Black Caribbean people. Racists gonna racist.