#technology-policy

#technology-policy

UK semiconductor start-up Fractile has announced a £100 million expansion of its British operations, scaling up in London and Bristol as ministers intensify calls for greater domestic ownership of critical artificial intelligence technology. The investment, to be deployed over the next three years, will fund a new industrial hardware engineering facility in Bristol, alongside the expansion of Fractile's existing UK sites and a significant increase in its domestic workforce. The company is focused on developing AI chips optimised for inference, the stage at which large language models generate outputs, an area of growing strategic importance as demand for real-time AI applications accelerates.

It seems like everywhere we turn we see dystopian stories about technology's impact on our lives and our futures-from tracking-based surveillance capitalism, to street level government surveillance, to the dominance of a few large platforms choking innovation, to the growing efforts by authoritarian governments to control what we see and say-the landscape can feel bleak. Exposing and articulating these problems is important, but so is envisioning and then building solutions. That's where our podcast comes in.

Our biggest adversary is waiting for the West to collapse. The game goes to he who outlasts the adversary, and what the Chinese want to do is to just keep things really, really stable and just wait for the Western countries to collapse. Just how powerful has China really become? What does China's leadership really want? If America is in a new Cold War, who's going to win?

President Donald Trump recently announced a plan to achieve AI dominance for the United States, emphasizing domestic infrastructure growth and export controls on advanced semiconductor chips.

Our initial reaction was that the new rules would shift funds from fiber to satellite, a negative for wired providers... We still think that but in talking to numerous stakeholders, that magnitude of the shift may be less than we initially thought.

Despite a supposedly hostile environment for AI R&D under Trump, North America still attracts the majority of AI investment, totaling $69.7 billion between February and May.

Friedman describes his ideal television advertising campaign, an em dash-laden riff on Donald Trump's anti-trans ad campaign from 2024. He writes: "Trump is for he/him - his grievances, his revenge, his corruption - and for bringing old stuff back 'again,' like coal and gasoline cars. Waymo Democrats are for 'We the People' and reinventing American industry anew."