Briefing Chat: Baby T. rex were killers from birth, suggest new fossils

**Nick Petruchow** (0:04)
Hello, and welcome to the Briefing Chat Podcast, the Friday show where we talk about a couple of articles that have been highlighted in The Nature Briefing, Nature's daily email newsletter of the latest science news. I'm your host, Nick Petruchow, and joining me today is Lizzie Gibney. Lizzie, how's it going?

**Lizzie Gibney** (0:20)
Hi, Nick, thanks for having me.

**Nick Petruchow** (0:22)
Well, thank you for coming on. And, you know, I've got a very interesting story, I think, this week to tell everyone about, but I know you've got maybe even more than one to talk to me about. Tell me what you were most interested to talk to me about this week.

**Lizzie Gibney** (0:34)
Well, I'll start with the story that I wrote. A little bit of bias in there. It's a story on how London is becoming an AI capital of the world, but a very specific one, kind of AI safety is something that London is like carving out a niche in. So you might remember the Mythos model from Anthropic from a month or two ago. That was like the most powerful model that was released, and there were all these fears about hacking happening because it was so good at breaking cyber security.
But it actually took a London organization, the AI Security Institute based in London, checking it out, evaluating it, before the whole world's researchers said, actually, yeah, this is quite worrying, but maybe not as worrying as some people had said. So this institute has kind of gathered steam and is the best resource of this type in the world. And it's got loads of really good researchers working there as well, which is quite hard to do as a government body. And so, yeah, the story is about how London is kind of carving out this little niche for itself.

**Nick Petruchow** (1:30)
So is this institute, I guess, sort of like a center of mass that is attracting other things with its gravity?

**Lizzie Gibney** (1:35)
That's exactly right. So, I mean, London, when we think about London and AI, already, like DeepMind is probably what springs to mind. So that was founded here and crucially stayed here, even when it got taken over by Google. But now, like, if you go walking around Kings Cross, which is where Nature is also based, there's gonna be an anthropic office, open AI, there's all these other kind of smaller organizations, and they're all based here in Kings Cross. They're calling it the Knowledge Quarter. And some of them are quite specific to AI. So there's also Apollo Research, which does a lot of work into scheming. Have you heard that word? It's like when models effectively try and, I don't like using the anthropomorphic language, but to deceive the people running it. They do things that they are not supposed to. And Apollo Research tests for that. And there's GovAI, which was a spin out from the University of Oxford. So, there's kind of like a long history of responsible AI research, ethical AI research happening in London, and it's now booming.

**Nick Petruchow** (2:29)
Does this present any issues though? Because, you know, when you think about the big tech companies, you think of California, obviously, it's a long way away. So, does it work having a AI safety capital in London?

**Lizzie Gibney** (2:40)
It seems to. I think there's actually an advantage in that being outside of that Silicon Valley bubble, there is just maybe a bit less hype over here in the UK. Like, there's a different lens on how people view AI. That was the feedback that I got when I wrote this story. But what I would also say is this kind of long history that the UK has of AI safety research has kind of now got a Silicon Valley gloss on it, though. So, to go back, ancient terms in AI, 2023, was when Rishi Sunak, who was then Prime Minister about 12 prime ministers ago, so you might not remember that either, he had this AI safety summit. It was the first one that had happened. And again, that was kind of putting forward the UK's pedigree on AI safety research. But since then, obviously, Trump has come in and that's put a very different slant on the kinds of things that people are thinking about when they think about AI safety. And it's now very much about security. It's about cyber security. It's about not developing bioweapons. It's about national security, like how can we stop these frontier models from doing really dangerous things?
And that's not really what are the only impacts of these models, as we as everyday people who use them know, you know, there are psychological potential issues. There have been many, many cases of AI psychosis. There's how it's affecting education, the justice system, exacerbating inequality, and all of those things kind of come under this idea of ethical AI or safety in AI. And that's not what's being tackled. So it's kind of great that we have somewhere that is taking AI safety seriously and is kind of flourishing in that way.