Jilly Cooper's Rivals, Cosine's sovereign AI, and Shabana Mahmood's spaceport gambit

Calum and Tom are back in the King Charles III Space Station bar, and this week they have a hit piece to enjoy. Prospect has run two thousand words on the online right under the headline “decline porn”, filed Anglofuturism alongside the doom-scrolling aesthetics accounts, and decided the whole project is aestheticised cope that lets the right avoid thinking seriously about Britain’s future. Best of all, it commissioned an illustration: five enormous, union-jack-tattooed Anglofuturists emerging from the darkness to menace the magazine’s readers.

Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Mythos, said to be the best hacker in the world several times over, has been held back, and the US government has now banned roughly all non-citizens from its other model, Fable — a ban that reaches even the AI Safety Institute, the British body that built a world-famous testing capability and can no longer run evals on the leading models. Calum’s gloss is the line of the episode: if it is not your national model, you are going to be a vassal. From there it is a tour of what sovereign capability actually looks like — Cosine, the British startup fine-tuning air-gapped coding models for banks still running on COBOL no one dares replace, and Lumen Sovereign, the mixture-of-experts model it is building with government money on the Isambard supercomputer in Bristol so that British firms can use frontier coding without shipping proprietary code overseas. There is a clear-eyed detour through the new national labs, BOLD and FAIR, through continual learning and the transformer’s attention mechanism, and through the uncomfortable fact that the straight lines on the graphs are still holding up — that something like 65 per cent of Anthropic’s own code is now written by Anthropic’s own models.

And in politics, Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms are about to enter Parliament, and behind the asylum headlines sits the Boriswave and indefinite leave to remain — a settlement the hosts price at something like £292,000 a person across perhaps two million people, done thoughtlessly to hold inflation down and now a permanent liability. Immigration is a futurist issue, Tom argues, because the decisions governments make about migration have effects that run not for years but for generations, and Calum puts it more bluntly: it is the thing most likely to prevent the future they want. Hence the title. If Britain wants high-productivity, high-GDP-per-capita, spaceport-building wealth, it has to decide what it can afford, and prioritise spaceports or pensions. Nothing we talk about on this podcast is impossible, a great deal of it has been done elsewhere, and all it takes is will. Other countries, after all, have massive spaceports. Be the Anglofuturist Prospect Magazine thinks you are.

The episode explores

— Prospect’s illustration of five muscle-bound, union-jack-tattooed Anglofuturists emerging from the darkness to menace its readers, and why the hosts take it as a compliment— The US government bans non-citizens from Anthropic’s Fable, the AI Safety Institute is locked out of the leading models, and the line that follows: “if it’s not your national model, you are going to be a vassal”— Cosine’s air-gapped, fine-tuned coding models, the Lumen mixture-of-experts on the Isambard supercomputer, and why Britain’s banks are still maintained in COBOL by people who refuse to retire— The BOLD and FAIR national labs, continual learning, and the claim that 65 per cent of Anthropic’s code is now written by Claude— Why “many on the right have abandoned conservatism with a small c” — and why the real status-quo party is now Labour— The left-wing case against the Boriswave: a few million arrivals unused to first-world wages suppress the bargaining power of workers— Japanese private railways, natural monopolies, and a country with “no state capacity and yet huge state liabilities”— Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms, indefinite leave to remain, and settlement priced at £292,000 a head — Why immigration is a futurist issue rather than a distraction from one — “a thing that might prevent the future we want”— Rivals as Anglofuturist Valhalla: a world of post-AGI abundance where the only meaningful competition is for status, not wealth— The striving middle class as “the destroyers of all that is England”, and the correct etiquette for stealing your co-host’s kimchi

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