LEAKED: A recent White House memo obtained by Axios labels Dario Amodei as a founding father of Effective Altruism and claims EA built "the AI-doom pipeline." The memo goes on to criticise the movement for prioritising "foreigners over citizens, shrimp over families, future hypothetical people over the living..."

Sam Hogg (@discoplomacy) discusses the likelihood of pacing the frontier: "Pacing the frontier, even between tech CEOs right now, doesn't necessarily have an agreed meaning. That is complicated even further when you take it to the Chinese system." "What we may well see agreement on, is an understanding that this technology could have negative consequences in certain areas." "The Americans have pushed for this through various means - setting up sort of track two discussions, a channel for dealing with risk as and when it rises, and maybe a shared framework around what those risks look like." "It's [regulation] unfortunately a double-edged sword because, on the one hand, if you're pro-regulation, it's like, 'Great, this is a frontier company saying this [to regulate].' But your suspicion is raised because it's a frontier company asking to be regulated." "And don't forget that within Westminster a large number of people still aren't AGI or AI pilled. There are a number of people who view the statements coming from Dario or Sam or Demis as being marketing hype."

Profound CEO @thejamescad thinks that creating AI slop is a skill issue and: "Slop is a skill issue". "We see some of the best teams on the planet are able to create marketing that is better than anything you've ever seen using AI, and we see people throw in a one-line prompt and create slop". "So it's a vector of skill."

We asked @discoplomacy about the 40 British MP's who are calling for a ban on the development of super intelligent AI: "Politicians in the UK right now, and I'm speaking in general terms, do not understand or do not have the incentive to articulate trade-offs and leverage". "Really the quality in our arena needs to step up massively because people just throw their names onto a letter isn't going to help." "If you would sit down with those 40 politicians that signed it, you'd probably get 40 different responses to what's AGI, what do you think the frontier is, what would you like to see regulated and how?"

"Agents want 10x or 100x more marketing to consume." @profound Co-Founder & CEO @thejamescad tells etn. about the steps companies must take to adapt to increased AI agents online: "Cloudflare reported that bot traffic exceeded human traffic on the internet for the first time ever. If I ask ChatGPT, Grok, or Gemini a question, they're going to send an agent on my behalf to different websites." "It puts this strain on the marketing world, which is if you aren't able to create 10x or 100x more marketing over the next five years, it's quite possible that your business will kind of fall into the background." "The only way you're going to do that is by hiring 10x or 100x more humans, or using a platform like Profound to build and use agents to create more content."

"Be absolutely delusional in your ambition." @discoplomacy on kickstarting growth in the UK: "The status quo is not going to last." "If you just lock in everything now and you don't fix anything, you don't improve anything, you don't break anything, the UK will break over time." "The choice then is what do you do to try and get out of this sort of stagnant feel that things aren't working? Well, you need to up your risk exposure." "If it's not working, start a company, become a competitor." "That's how the free market works, baby."

GM. Big Show Today. Here's the line up: - @MenloRajeev ($PUBM) - @DadaJudith (Langdock & Visionaries) - @jpatel41 (Cisco) - @vaznigel (Publicis Sapient) - @ethanbarajas11 & @j_palmer00 (Icarus Robotics) - @jacsebl (Legora) See you on the show.

"Hang on a second. The internet is going to be disintermediated by agents." After raising a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation, Profound Co-Founder and CEO @thejamescad told us about his Big Short moment: "Have you seen the movie The Big Short? You know when they go down to Florida and ... that's the kind of wake up moment where they're like, 'Holy shit this is a really big deal.'" "Back in 2024 when we're thinking about this idea. We're like, 'Hang on a second. The internet is going to be disintermediated by agents.'" "The world relies on blue link search for all information retrieval, so surely this is going to be the biggest platform shift in the history of the internet."

"You have to assume that there are two more Anthropic and OpenAIs." 20VC General Partner @PaulBonnet on the bets VCs are placing on Neo-labs: "Many new labs [are] raising at 5 billion seed or pre-seed. When you invest at 5 billion seed or pre-seed, what you're really saying is that company will be worth at least 100 billion." "There haven't been many hundred-billion-dollar-plus exits in the history of technology. When that place bet is placed 10, 20 times over, you have to start asking, where is all that value coming from?" "I'm really hoping that we have some incredible breakouts from London. But you have to assume that there are two more Anthropic and OpenAIs. And you have to assume that knowing that Anthropic and OpenAI already exist."

BREAKING: Ex-Google Deepmind researchers, Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill and Philip Ball are in talks to raise $700M at $3.7B valuation to create a new Neo-lab, led by Lightspeed and Index Ventures, per FT.

$IONQ Chairman and CEO @NiccoloDeMasi discusses aspirations of being the first 10-figure revenue quantum company: "We posted an $80 million quarter in Q2 from a revenue perspective... about double the revenue of every other public company in our sector combined." "We said we'll do $450 to $460 million this year. We were the first quantum company in the world to reach seven figures of revenue, eight figures of revenue, nine figures of revenue." "Of course, my aspiration is to be the first to 10 figures of revenue." "When you're doing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, I think we can all agree it's a business that's here and now."