Why a Nation Can't Outsource Its Frontier AI - Alistair Pullen (Cosine AI)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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Welcome to Sephora.

**Tim Scarfe** (0:31)
I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfume-y.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:36)
I got you.

**Alistair Pullen** (0:36)
Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.

**Tim Scarfe** (0:40)
Let's get into layering.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:41)
My concealer is making me look worse? Sounds like the wrong shade.
Let's get you matched. There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty.

**Alistair Pullen** (0:54)
Only at Sephora.

**Tim Scarfe** (0:56)
Hi.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:57)
Let's get you a basket.

**Tim Scarfe** (1:00)
I was horrified as many were when Fable suddenly got banned.

**Alistair Pullen** (1:05)
We have obtained the mandate to build the UK's first sovereign LLM.

**Tim Scarfe** (1:10)
How can you do in millions what they are doing with billions?

**Alistair Pullen** (1:13)
There isn't a huge amount of room for error or a huge amount of wiggle room. It was not something that was on my bingo card in January. Numbers like 10trill being knocked around. We're compressing most of the internet at that point.

**Tim Scarfe** (1:25)
Really funny. Up to Claude, delete your production database. It'll say, oh, you're right to point that out.

**Alistair Pullen** (1:31)
Agentic harnesses are getting less important over time. A model can probably do with bash only basically any task these days. Also, thank you, Donald Trump.

**Tim Scarfe** (1:41)
Yeah, I mean, for the first time, I feel like a second class citizen because they are going faster than I am and I really hate that.

**Alistair Pullen** (1:46)
That boils my blood more than anyone else.
And we are going to do everything we can to pull this off. We have no choice but to make it happen.

**Tim Scarfe** (1:54)
Alistair, it's great to meet you, mate. We are here in London where it's customary to say hello, Geyser.

**Alistair Pullen** (2:00)
Hello, Geyser.

**Tim Scarfe** (2:01)
So where in London are we?

**Alistair Pullen** (2:03)
We are in Hoxton right now. So we're in Shoreditch. We're about half a mile away from where Cosine started in my apartment, which was in Hoxton Square just over there.
So we haven't come very far, but we have expanded a fair bit since then.

**Tim Scarfe** (2:15)
And what is Cosine?

**Alistair Pullen** (2:16)
Cosine is a Frontier Lab based here in the UK.
Prior to about three months ago, we built best-in-class coding agents specifically for highly regulated and high-side environments. So think things like financial services, insurance, defense, and so on. But more recently, we have obtained the mandate to build the UK's first sort of sovereign LLM, which is a much more ambitious vision and something which is on a scale much larger than what we've done before, but it's very exciting to be working on it.

**Tim Scarfe** (2:48)
So tell me about that sovereign AI piece. I should say, by the way, so I read the article about you in The Telegraph.
And I was horrified, as many were, when Fable suddenly got banned because of this export control. And now everyone suddenly is thinking about sovereign AI. So tell me the story.

**Alistair Pullen** (3:07)
So, well, it ties into a bunch of different things. It ties into the back story of Cosine. And one of the reasons we're fortunate to be placed to be able to do sovereign AI is that we have a lot of expertise around model training, model building, all of the infra, algorithms, data, people that you need to do that kind of thing. And we've been doing that for some time. So we already had all those things in the organization. And then probably, I'd say nine, 10 weeks ago, we were inducted into the government's sovereign AI unit. Or backed by them, I should say. That is something that they have put out to increase the number of sovereign AI companies that are being built in the UK. And what that looks like in practice for us is an allocation of compute on the Isambard supercomputer cluster out in Bristol. And that has allowed us to... Well, honestly, it's one of the things that's unlocked our ability to even have the ambition to do something like this, right?