Firstly, congrats! As a Brit this looks cool, and I'm happy to see it. I wish you every success.
Secondly: I get that 'sovereign' is probably an important sales term for your company. But this, in common with the government's 'sov/ai' fund, does not deserve to be described as sovereign. This is other countries' models served on chips designed and manufactured abroad, powered by a grid which imports 44% of its power.
Of course this isn't your company's fault. Last week I went to an event where the sovereignai.gov.uk people presented. In a very Keir Starmer way (spiritually, he wasn't there), they said in as many words 'oh but I'm sure all reasonable people would agree _really_ sovereign AI would be too hard. So let's all agree to pretend that just popping a bit more money into the AI startup ecosystem is a sovereign AI strategy'.
I'm unsure if the UK does need to be sovereign in anything; it certainly doesn't seem to want to be. But I will continue to poke fun at anything using the pompous phrase 'sovereign' for anything that isn't.
If sovereign AI is a problem you're in earnest about, I hope you go after it seriously, and fix the rest of the stack. I'll cheer you on!
Sovereign capability just means that no foreign government can pull the plug. Who cares where it was copied from?
If it were somehow legal for a company to provide MS Office (not a clone) fully in the UK with no control from Microsoft, that would also count as a sovereign capability, even though none of the code was written in the uk.
Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.
> Sovereign capability just means that no foreign government can pull the plug
OK, fair enough on 'pull the plug ~instantly'. But models and chips age fast. If another country can stop you getting new models and chips, this means you're sovereign in state-of-the-art AI for only a window of a year or two (maybe this will widen if model progress tails off).
If it is a short window, strategically, that doesn't seem worth much given the timelines of:
a) inter-state conflict, or trade wars
b) cold-start time to be able to make your own models and chips
> Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.
Noted. But as a data-point, the audience at the event I mentioned (various AI builders and founders) made it clear from their questions to the speaker that the 'sovereign' that sov/ai was aiming at was hollow, for exactly the reasons I've stated.
> But models and chips age fast. If another country can stop you getting new models and chips, this means you're sovereign in state-of-the-art AI for only a window of a year or two
Gell-Mann suggests I should treat the rest of your post with skepticism.
EDIT: maybe you meant the UK total primary energy? I feel like that's extending the boundary a bit far. Should we start digging for uranium? Or stick to renewables, but only with locally sourced silica and rare earths?
> EDIT: maybe you meant the UK total primary energy? I feel like that's extending the boundary a bit far.
If we're talking about 'sovereign', is it too far? I think the history of conflict in the modern era, hot and cold, shows that your rivals' ability to disrupt your energy imports matters a lot.
> nowadays every 16-year-old web-dev reaches for Array.map(x => <div>{x}</div>) when they write their pages in the most popular framework. These higher-order functions have now become part of the “hello world”
It's just wrong to ascribe the popularisation of HOFs like `map` to Haskell. `map` was there in good old (practical) Lisp 1.5 back in the 1960s. Why ascribe this to Haskell (released 1990) rather than Lisp? Guido said Python v1 (1994) got HOFs "courtesy of (I believe) a Lisp hacker who missed them"[1], Ruby had blocks in V1 (1995). Haskell's research direction was not about very, very old news like HOFs, it was about non-strict evaluation, and cool type system stuff.
I would assume that most of the popular high-order functions came from the lisp world; 16 year web devs are using Javascript which took more than a bit of inspiration from the lisps.
That said, to really squeeze the most out of HOFs the language probably needs a well developed type system. I've noticed with untyped code that at some point HOFs start becoming hard to write because the layers of abstraction get confusing in a way that static analysis would be helpful with. Although my lesson there is to not go overboard with HOFs - if I need static analysis to write working code it is probably too clever to understand by reading it! The Haskell community might succeed in proving that view wrong, but until then...
> I've noticed with untyped code that at some point HOFs start becoming hard to write because the layers of abstraction get confusing […]
I have the same with Nix (from NixOS).
It’s a really nice idea to have a functional language that compiles to a working linux installation, but those abstract functions can get really complicated, especially when I return to something I wrote six months ago.
If you live in or near London, go for a (free) tour of the Linnean Society. Worth it to see his beautiful notebooks alone. Also learned that he included phoenixes in his original taxonomy!
One of the best things about living in London. If you visit, take a walk there and then end up in one of the many brilliant pubs nearby - The Holly Bush, Wells, Spainard’s Inn, Magdala, Garden Gate, or sit in Keats’ house’s garden.
Your take is cliché, factually wrong, and makes you look callous all at once, congrats! Any other major religions' holidays you'd like to dismiss while you're at it?
Sounds wonderful! Would love if this were a thing elsewhere. I don't think I've experienced anything similar since I left uni, where unplanned, all-night conversations might happen randomly in halls' kitchens, pubs etc.
Secondly: I get that 'sovereign' is probably an important sales term for your company. But this, in common with the government's 'sov/ai' fund, does not deserve to be described as sovereign. This is other countries' models served on chips designed and manufactured abroad, powered by a grid which imports 44% of its power.
Of course this isn't your company's fault. Last week I went to an event where the sovereignai.gov.uk people presented. In a very Keir Starmer way (spiritually, he wasn't there), they said in as many words 'oh but I'm sure all reasonable people would agree _really_ sovereign AI would be too hard. So let's all agree to pretend that just popping a bit more money into the AI startup ecosystem is a sovereign AI strategy'.
I'm unsure if the UK does need to be sovereign in anything; it certainly doesn't seem to want to be. But I will continue to poke fun at anything using the pompous phrase 'sovereign' for anything that isn't.
If sovereign AI is a problem you're in earnest about, I hope you go after it seriously, and fix the rest of the stack. I'll cheer you on!