Lee Kuan Yew:
“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."
This week the most advanced AI model on the planet got switched off by a foreign government. British researchers were studying it. British companies were testing it. British hospitals were piloting it. Not any more.
This isn't an AI story. It's the story of every industry we used to lead.
Britain has some of the best AI talent in the world. DeepMind was built here. Our AI Safety Institute writes the rules other countries follow. We have the researchers, the universities, the standards.
What we don't have is the power stations to run the data centres, the planning system to build them, or the industrial base to make the chips. So the work happens here and the value lands somewhere else. We invent. Others build. Others decide. Then we read about it on Saturday morning.
Same story as the kit our soldiers don't have. Same story as the factories we used to.
I spent nine months in government making this argument inside the room. I'll make it louder from outside.
a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.
a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.
the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.
he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.
Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.
GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.
Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.
Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.
then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."
GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.
then he splits the users by income.
Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.
18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.
so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.
it isn't recommending the best option for you.
it's reading the room. and the room is paying.
read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b
Quince started out just selling cashmere sweaters
But now... crazy things are happening, and they are absolutely crushing
HUGE lesson in SKU expansion here - know your customer, sell them everything
From a billion dollars to Mbappe for a one-year contract to $6 billion for an NFL team with a middling record on the field, it is difficult to make financial sense of what's happening in sports today. My trophy asset explanation is in this post: https://t.co/0btk2f3ijq
Much of the innovation in the last few decades was in search, social, crypto, and AI, because pure math is the last unregulated frontier.
Invite the regulators in and they’ll freeze innovation here just as they did in healthcare and energy.
Harry Potter is the #2 best-selling book of the last quarter century.
Only behind The Bible.
And JK Rowling used 1 storytelling framework for the entire series.
Here’s a breakdown:
Extraordinary new paper from Google on medicine & AI: When Google tuned a AI chatbot to answer common medical questions, doctors judged 92.6% of its answers right … compared to 92.9% of answers given by other doctors.
And look at the pace of improvement! https://t.co/2Tc2YTUR6E
For Iran, #WomanLifeFreedom is a turning point. “Iranian women have been waiting for four decades for this moment when they could take matters into their own hands,” a former director of the Wilson Center’s Middle East program said.
https://t.co/rBoBKHNfsL
Can you imagine the US government sending armed guerrilla forces to Boston to surround Harvard and MIT and start killing students? Well, that is exactly what is going on in Tehran, Iran as I tweet this. The world media seems to be deaf and blind!!
#دانشگاه_شریف#مهسا_امینی
USA = 5% world pop, but 60% of top 1% carbon emitters, & more emissions than bottom 50% world emitters
It's going to take time before the country can portray itselft as a climate leader
How Biden’s Climate Ambitions Could Shift America’s Global Footprint https://t.co/iDKqEOWG7r
@sarahlibowsky Poor kids and teachers - they'll never know what it's like to have a real snow day! They "perfected" remote teaching/virtual classrooms, and no longer give kids the day off.