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NON COMPETES BANNED Today, the PM has announced that his Government will legislate to functionally ban non-compete agreements for startups and scaleups in the UK or as he called it - the Bosman ruling for ruling for the innovation sector' 😂 At the @StartupCltn been working on this for months and we think it’s a huge potential unlock for our tech ecosystem. Here’s what you need to know… - Measures to functionally ban non-competes for startups and scaleups in the UK are going to be set out. - There will also be consultation on a wider set of restrictive practices including gardening leave. - More detail on these plans at the budget in a few weeks (Wednesday 28th October) including a timetable for consultation with a view to legislation in the coming months. We think this is a huge move and so do lots of friends including so many of the great founders that signed the letter with Inherent just the other week. Why? Because talent matters and mobile talent means startups can build. The Valley was built on free-flowing talent. In the UK, we’re now seeing our own versions of this story with companies being built from alumni of both homegrown firms like Revolut and beyond. But we need that to move faster. Hiring and building faster means British startups and scaleups can grow faster. Barriers to that slow our ecosystem down. We won’t pretend it will be perfect, and people (including some of our friends but also lots of fairly vested interests too) will have a right to disagree. But we think that startups will thrive and win in a faster paced Britain. So we are delighted with the progress today - as part of a strong speech by the PM outlining his ambition for building the world’s leading innovation nation including more on tax, growing companies outside London and more. But this is the start, not the end of the process. The announcement launches a consultation. It doesn't mean the issue is settled. How far reform goes, and what it looks like on the ground, is still to be decided. The Prime Minister today has done something that can materially impact the trajectory of the UK tech ecosystem and with it our economy - but only if we make sure it’s delivered. So, the real work starts now.

.@nathanbenaich explains why AI labs are shifting compute from pretraining to RL: "The last 4-5 years have been trying to figure out what the recipe is for pretraining, what is the best data mixture, what are the best ingredients to this whole magical soup." "Then over the years we figured out how to do that better. So it strikes me as normal that one would end up spending less money on exploratory work because the solution is more in the plain eye." "The whole pitch with RL is this idea that what we have as solutions today are really local maxima that were discovered through human ingenuity and sharing, through reading and whatnot. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's the global maxima."

Air Street Capital GP @nathanbenaich says 99% of people still have no idea what to do with AI because those building it aren't very effective at educating people on how to use it, so the labs should take a page out of Apple's book: "I would love there to be a Genius Bar for AI."

We're live and it's a huge day: Nick Bostrom is joining MTS today at 9:30am PT for a full hour of conversation, followed by @real_ioannis - Co-Founder and CTO at Reflection AI talking about Beam, Reflection's latest 501B open-weight model @nathanbenaich - Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital talking about the State of AI Report 2026, out today @natolambert - Co-Founder and Executive Director at Trillium Labs talking about his new nonprofit @Brendan_McCord - Founder at Cosmos Ventures talking about its $77.6M Fund I for philosopher-builders @sytaylor - Founder at Brainfood talking about his essay "Fintech is Dead" @ml_angelopoulos - Co-founder and CEO at Arena talking about their $200m raise at a $3.1b valuation, and the release of their Alignment Index @nautsimon_ - Founding Member of Technical Staff, @a_ramabadran, Member of Technical Staff and @tobiges, Member of Technical Staff at Axiom Math talking about DrivingBench, where frontier AI models drive a real car @BrettHarrison - Founder and CEO at Architect talking about Liquid Inference @PrinehaN - Professor at UCLA and Operating Partner at DCVC talking about DARPA moving four more teams into the final stage of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative @ayushswrites - Founder and CEO at Warp talking about Warp 2.0 and AI agents for HR and payroll

Happy Thursday. On today's show: - @mignano (USV) - @rebeccakaden (USV) - @nathanbenaich (Air Street Capital) - @ml_angelopoulos (Arena) - @M_Sindicich (Navan) - @healeycypher (Navan) - @moritz_stephan (Hone) See you on the stream.

the models have no moat (OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI) the IDEs have no moat (Cursor, Windsurf) the harnesses have no moat (Cognition, Factory, LangChain) the app builders have no moat (Replit, Lovable, Bolt) the wrappers have no moat (Harvey, Abridge, OpenEvidence) the inference providers have no moat (Together, Fireworks, Groq) the voice layer has no moat (Sierra, Decagon, ElevenLabs) the data labeling companies have no moat (Scale, Surge, Mercor) the AI infrastructure has no moat (Baseten, Modal, Railway) the neoclouds have no moat (CoreWeave, Lambda, Crusoe) the generative media companies have no moat (Runway, Higgsfield, Suno) apparently nobody in AI has a moat except the venture firm ☠️

is it just me or is opus 5 (on high) making a lot of mistakes when you ask it are you sure or point out something that seems off i'm getting a lot of this in the last weeks, ro eg - "Confirmed, and I need to correct myself" - "Let me fix the note, which carries the same overreach." - "No — and I was wrong to imply otherwise. Thanks for stopping on it."