Tim Bradshaw

Global tech correspondent @FT
[email protected]
Signal: tim.11 (no PR pitches please)

[Tim Bradshaw @tim]

In these uncertain times for Twitter verification, here's the official @FinancialTimes list of @FinancialTimes journalists https://t.co/tN82Cm3lX0

[Zijing Wu @zijing_wu]

Our take: China unveils draft export controls on AI and chips
* Models >2T or ranked top 10 globally now need approval to release weights and source codes; access remain
* Chip design technology incl stacking and networking now on the list

https://t.co/THtUYAzgKr

[Tim Bradshaw @tim]

Quitting the frontier AI race "will end up costing Europe what remains of its place in the world and lock it into a regime of economic dependence unprecedented in the history of civilizations", says Mistral CEO.
(@paulg response: "It may be too late")

[Arthur Mensch @arthurmensch]

Should Europe leave frontier AI to the Americans and the Chinese?

The idea has gained ground in Europe. It is a fundamental mistake.
Build or surrender: for now, the choice is still ours.

Full article below. https://t.co/v1biuiXoYe

[Tim Bradshaw @tim]

If you haven’t already ordered your iPhone Duo for Christmas… bad luck

[Olivia Solon @oliviasolon]

NEW: Nscale has a massive $103 billion data center pipeline but only has a tiny fraction online. We set out to investigate how its buildout is going and found delays and setbacks including equipment failures, power constraints & alleged labor violations.

https://t.co/0uLVthk9PI

[Peter Gostev @petergostev]

Holy cow, so based on OpenAI's UK filings, average salary in 2025 was £794k and £1.52m share based compensation on top of that.

So the total was £2.35m = $3.1m per employee

[Tim Bradshaw @tim]

@prabinjoel no training costs here I guess...

[Tim Bradshaw @tim]

OpenAI's UK accounts for 2025 just hit Companies House. Out of date now but still interesting. Revenue up more than 3x to £293m - and profitable! £32m in pre tax profit

[Tim Bradshaw @tim]

full docs here https://t.co/96VkUOiZG3

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.

- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.

The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.

So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.

[Arash Massoudi @ArashMassoudi]

BIG @FT SCOOP

Nvidia is in talks to acquire or deepen its investment in Reflection AI, a developer of open-weight models that President Donald Trump’s administration hopes will rival cheap Chinese alternatives

w/ @GeorgeNHammond @MActon93 George Steer

https://t.co/MKIKhmMQnM

[Press Gazette @pressgazette]

EXCLUSIVE: The Quartz website is now mainly produced by one AI-assisted reporter writing 50+ stories per day

[FT Technology News @fttechnews]

Burnham set to launch crackdown on non-compete clauses https://t.co/UkJgFgZfsM

[Lisa Abramowicz @lisaabramowicz1]

Evidence of how leveraged the entire tech sector is to OpenAI & Anthropic: an FT story about OpenAI's revenue's being less than initially reported is spurring a more than 5% drop in Oracle shares, exacerbating losses from Nvidia and AMD to Microsoft https://t.co/8rhQ9dvxXM.

[Tim Rocktäschel @_rockt]

"It mystifies why US, Canadian, Japanese and Singaporean investors are more enthusiastic backers of Britain’s young companies than the country’s own institutional funds. An obvious investment opportunity lies under their own noses. It would be tragic for Britain if they fail to act."

[Tim Bradshaw @tim]

@FT @GeorgeNHammond @sjhmorris read it here https://t.co/oMgJGQLwVW

[Tim Bradshaw @tim]

Nasdaq tanking on bombshell @FT report that OpenAI's annualised revenues are $20bn LESS than previously signalled by @GeorgeNHammond @sjhmorris

[FT Technology News @fttechnews]

Lex in depth: Anthropic at $2tn isn’t far-fetched https://t.co/700yNFi8Wx

[Gideon Rachman @gideonrachman]

My new book - out on October 22nd.

[Tim Bradshaw @tim]

@scmallaby Yep! Here’s our scoop @FT on the $3.7bn neolab in question, Emulate https://t.co/Y0DLtnrnbF