Welcome to another episode

of Cloud Unplugged.

We have our usual stories in the news,

the tech stories.

We have the AI summit that's

just happened in London and

all the latest news from there,

of which there seems to be many.

I won't call out the specifics just yet.

The big China data leak,

six hundred and thirty one

gigabytes of data,

personal data got found and leaked.

OpenAI start signing deals

with Google because they

need more compute and the

new exoskeleton by

Wondercraft has started to

get rolled out more

officially with some more

investment to help people

with disabilities move

better and walk about.

Lewis, what's the latest with you?

What's the latest with me?

What did we do at the weekend?

Oh,

I bought an action cam because I'm

going on holiday.

We finalised our holiday to

Turkey and there's some great water.

And my last action cam got scratch linted.

So I thought, oh, you only live once.

Yellow.

Can you not use your pixel?

Does that not do that?

You need to get like a waterproof case.

And I used to have an Insta

three sixty thing.

Oh, product placement.

Whoops.

And it was great.

And so I got the latest one

of those because it's even

greater and you can replace

the lenses now.

So I remember you using your

Google Pixel and being

super chuffed about how

amazing it's going to be underwater.

And it did work and you had

all the amazing videos,

but then it corroded.

and I wouldn't charge you or something.

Yeah, it worked underwater,

but in saltwater, famously,

it won't work for long.

yeah so that was a bit of a

faux pas wasn't it of the

uh yeah a bit of a missed

missile I think a bit of a

mr I'm pretty sure in their

adverts they are scuba

diving and all kinds of

things and high-fiving or

whatever they I'm I could

be making it up just

because of all the adverts

um that you kind of watch

but all right so you're

going to turkey and you've

invested in a new action cam

yeah um I don't really know

what an action cam is but

I'm guessing obviously it's

a three sixty camera so

it's got two light you also

have a gopro though you had

a gopro snowboard it was a

it was an insta three sixty

then a really old one which

I scratched the lenses up

So I've replaced it.

What, snowboarding,

going through trees and things like that?

Weirdly,

it wasn't snowboarding because it

had plenty of jobs.

I've dunked it in the snow.

I did cartwheels and all sorts with it.

But this time, I don't know,

it was actually attached to

a remote-controlled car on a stony beach,

and it rolled over and just

scratched both lenses.

Oh, no.

Oh, well.

Why would you do that?

Also,

were the people that were sunbathing

on the beach aware that you

were going up and down the beach?

On Greenwich Beach.

On Greenwich Beach.

No one else there.

On your own?

Were you on your own with a camera?

No, I was with my son.

It was about three years ago.

He was younger and

appreciated the camera a

whole lot more on the car.

Yeah, notes of stealth.

Maybe don't attend that

beach if you're worried

about your privacy because

Lewis is going up and down

it with a remote-controlled

car filming you.

That's all I can say.

I can do it again now with

protection on the lenses.

No, anyway, moving on.

How about yourself?

Anything?

I have family at the moment

and we are going to France tomorrow.

But early in the morning... I mean,

we're all...

Get up early anyway,

but I'm going to do the

Euro tunnel and go over

there and then drive.

Luckily, sharing the drive.

I've done it before my own.

I think I came all the way from Spain.

It was like sixteen hours

drive or something insane

that I did in one little swoop,

which I'd never repeat ever

again because I thought it

was literally I think I

might have cried whilst I was driving.

I love it.

I used to drive all the way

to Austria every year for

about ten years.

And Amy came along a couple of times,

a few times.

But she's like you.

I don't know about crying,

but she certainly doesn't.

relish the idea anymore.

You're trying to make out a melodramatic.

Is that what you're suggesting?

Yeah, I mean, I still go.

I often go with my mate Chris.

We drive down in his

transporter van that he

takes down so he's got

there for the family.

So we drive one way.

But it really doesn't bother me.

You zone out,

you see a lot of different places.

Honestly,

the driving is not the problem per se.

It is something with the foot action.

Causing me to get sciatica in my hip.

Happens on my right,

obviously because you're

using the pedal on my right

foot most of the time, up and down,

up and down with the accelerator.

And I don't know what happens.

Not very interesting story,

but it like slowly I start

to get like pain down my

leg to the point where I

start to like actually

can't really feel my foot.

it's I don't know I don't

know why maybe I'm just not

very simple but anyway

probably should get it

looked at maybe I need uh

the wondercraft exoskeleton

to help me in my car when I drive

But yeah, maybe on to the stories,

the UK government's announcements,

because we've had the Tech London.

Twenty twenty five.

I submit happening.

I've been quite a few things

going on there,

quite a few different announcements.

um they've obviously done a

big hurrah on this one

billion investment in high

performance computing um

otherwise abbreviated to

hpc um when people refer to

that um edinburgh I think

has announced that they're

going to get seven and

fifty million um to kind of

be invested in ai

development and then the

video announced um some

announcements towards to support that

one billion investment,

but also announced having

some UK sovereign AI forum

with BT and others.

And then there was other

stories around co-pilot

getting rolled out for

Barclays Bank in the UK.

um google doing things in

government were like um

house planning you know if

you want to kind of make

changes to your house

getting planning approval

or building new buildings

in the uk and simplifying

that and automating that as

much as possible to make

decisions informed

decisions and all these

things all these amazing

things and I think is it

finished tomorrow I think

it finishes tomorrow I

think so yeah yeah so what

do you think about it all

do you think this is like where

We're the new China, do you think?

We are the new US.

We are the big dog.

Geopolitically,

there's a lot of money in

the hills that people can

see and they want to align

themselves with a lot of new business.

And historically,

I think the UK is in a bit

of a sweet spot.

I think that's the interview that...

that RPM had with the CEO of

NVIDIA talking about how

the Google DeepMind

co-founders and how a lot

of excellence in the field,

Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI,

some people refer to him as

inventing transformers.

There's a lot of history in

the UK with regards to

So yeah,

I think that's one lens to put it

through.

And it means that there are

DeepMind HQs here and

there's a lot of talent coming through.

But I think the government

wanting to get further

investment using those

credentials to bolster UK PLC

it makes a lot of sense.

But I think the tech

companies also see that we

have a talent pool and

I don't know,

they're going around everywhere, though,

geopolitically.

They're now in France doing the same.

I don't know if we're unique,

but certainly a move to

make sure that we have

access to the latest models

to accelerate our own

government initiatives,

but also we get jobs by

having massive data centres and sovereign

AI inference running locally.

So I don't know.

I think it's just a scramble

across the world in all

directions for all players, really.

Yeah.

I mean, obviously, economically,

we haven't been doing great.

Our growth has been pretty.

I mean, we did grow a tiny bit.

I think it was zero point

five on the GDP or something.

So there's been a bit of a

struggle on economic growth

in the UK in general.

So I think they obviously

seeing this as like, well,

I think a few things that

they're obviously seeing

that can we get investment in place?

I guess the investment,

especially with this technology,

because a bit more

revolutionary also could

potentially not just make

lots of money through

additional companies and

other initiatives.

but also optimize the

government to reduce their costs.

So it's a double win, I think,

on the type of tech,

like how much of an enabler

it is to other things,

not just on pure growth,

but also savings.

So obviously that made a lot of sense.

I'm like, right,

let's really get on the

bandwagon and start to invest.

But they've also tried to

remove all of the bottlenecks

for data centres,

which I kind of found was a

bit ironic on the Google's

initiative of making

planning approval really

easy for buildings at the

same time that you need

data centre buildings to be

going up so you can build

new data centres.

And also relaxing a lot of

the hurdles on those things

that kind of get in the way

where they can't get approval.

But also there was an announcement on...

basically, oh, what was it?

Nuclear energy plant getting agreed,

I think.

Sizewell C, I think,

is going to get the go-ahead.

It's going to get the go-ahead, yeah.

Which is also all linked to

the same type of thing,

energy for the data centres, clean energy,

et cetera, et cetera.

But what was interesting was that

the kind of currently there

wasn't huge amounts of beyond the video.

And then Microsoft obviously

have obviously their own

general investment,

same as Amazon and Google do.

They obviously got data centres here.

It wasn't like a big push I

noticed from US firms

outside of Nvidia on those investments,

which I thought was a

little bit interesting,

which has been going on in

other places like Switzerland,

which obviously we spoke about before.

But then I think they're

wanting the sovereignty

element and the question of

whether they have enough

compute to basically train

their own models to then

remove reliance on the US.

Because basically, essentially,

you're going to need insane

scale for more complex and

larger model sets.

which I still don't believe

on the amount of compute

that we're aiming for is

still quite enough for the very,

very large model.

So you'd still need to go to

the US or EU data centers.

despite the amount of gpu so

I think it only works for

certain model sizes depends

on how big the model is

going to be in the data set

essentially what the

training deep learning

basically needs to go on so

I'm not sure if it's

actually going to be enough

compute overall but we'll

see um on the investment

for the amount of training

who knows I'm not sure I'm

not an expert on

Yeah,

I don't know how much training versus

inference and what the

divide is on these investments,

whether it's just local inference or,

you know, Google.

I mean,

I'd imagine they have a lot of

Tensor hardware in the UK

for their own purposes for

training for Google

DeepMind because that's

where all the people are.

But...

I don't know.

You know,

you can get things run wherever they are.

They don't need to

necessarily be low latency for training.

I think that's the thing.

It can be wherever the training happens.

They don't want to use Google.

That was the point, I think.

Because it's a US company.

So I don't think, it just seems, again,

geopolitical.

I don't think they want to

be using Microsoft or Amazon or, you know,

Google.

So they'll use NVIDIA instead to send it.

They'll be using someone.

They will, but that's compute.

That isn't the services that

are wrapping all of that compute.

It does.

Having local models,

local training and local

hosting for inference all makes sense.

Who exactly has the

expertise and whether we

have enough local expertise

for all of the stack.

That's it, isn't it?

I guess that's why I think

it was interesting because

The bit I noticed was there

isn't a service wrap around this compute,

which then makes you feel like, okay,

well, this is very much geopolitical then,

because you don't want

almost the service wrap,

because then how do you really trust

It's all a bit disguised by

the services of beneath the computer,

you're not really using the

raw compute directly.

So they're like, no,

we want to use the raw

compute and we can trust it

and we know and then we can

just train our own.

Well,

that's how it felt a little bit and

why they're not leveraging

existing investments that

are in the UK for that.

and I mean as you know like

even just tying together a

load of compute in a data

center having a service

wrap of some sort and apis

and a you know dare I say a

cloud abstraction like it

without that it's almost

impossible to do any sort

of true yeah running anyway

so yeah but god what a boring

like thing though isn't it a

little bit data center I

feel like right back to

like early two thousands

almost or like mid to early

two thousand so about data centers and

Like, what the hell is going on?

We're like backwards and

forwards all at the same time.

Backwards and forwards all in parallel.

Interesting.

I mean, it shows, like, the core weave,

you know, value proposition is very real,

you know.

Even the cloud vendors

scaling up massive compute for AI and

is similar but a bit

different you know it's

you're different chips on

different size nodes with

different requirements so

you know typically you'd

have a different whole

cabinet stack and that

means you know

specialization and yeah

yeah if you're an energy I

mean this is what it's

going to be like the

nationalization of energy

you know, would be like a key move,

I would say, right now by obviously,

you know, Gov, because, yeah,

or if you want to invest money,

investing in energy is probably like,

you know, one or the other,

whether it's nationalised

or whether you're investing,

it feels like that is going

to be the key linchpin, obviously,

on all of this in the end.

The UK has said that, you know,

it is our government,

current policy to or at

least it was talked about a

lot I don't know if it's

the now exact thing

happening ed milliband

talks a lot they're putting

solar panels on roofs at

last um for new builds like

okay finally um but uh you

know uh getting getting the

right right amount of power

nationalised and allowing UK

population to benefit from

these things in the future,

and AI included.

It seems rational.

It seems, you know,

you just need to look at normal...

You just need to look at

Norway to see how much a

sovereign wealth fund can

be valuable for the

population in the future.

I was watching something with Simon Reeve.

He did a great series on it

really recently.

And they now make more money

from their sovereign wealth fund,

which is the biggest, if not

by one sovereign wealth fund in the world.

And they now make more money

than they spend.

So literally for all their national health,

for all of their education,

all the way up to degree level,

it's all free and it's all

inclusive in the state and

it's all fully paid for.

And they're literally making

more money than they've got.

Honestly, that is insane.

Those eight Norwegians that are there,

I mean,

how have they managed to support those?

I think there's ten now.

I think there's ten people.

Okay.

How on earth they've managed

to support those ten people

in Norway with all that investment?

It beggars belief.

Well, yeah.

That's a bit sarcastic.

That was very sarcastic.

Apologies to Norway.

But no, I mean, literally,

the inflection point,

the UK and Norway had the

same access to the North

Sea at the same time and

were both investing.

We sold it to private companies.

They kept it.

Nationalised.

Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.

And they invested it all and we didn't.

Slowly,

slowly removed the crutches that we

had into privatised companies.

Let's see if there's a

better way forward from now.

But this is a bit more exciting, I feel.

Not to dismiss the UK and

some of the great announcements of AI,

but it's a lot of news

that's a bit repetitive.

But this I found super interesting,

which is obviously this

personal data getting leaked.

And it wasn't like a small amount.

This is what's a bit insane about it.

It's huge data set.

Absolutely insane.

Yeah.

So like six hundred and

thirty one gigabytes of data,

Chinese personal information, basically.

And it was in an old Mongo DB.

But weirdly, in Mongo DB with no password,

not encrypted and on the Internet,

And it had like WeChat,

so basically user details.

So, eight hundred and five million records,

WeChat records, user detail records.

It had seven hundred and

eighty million residential

addresses in there.

It had bank statements,

six hundred and thirty

million bank statements.

alipay records ids phone

numbers usernames messaging

data vehicle registration

pensions gambling habits

like everything was in

there which kind of makes

sense for china's bit of a

surveillance data I think

is potentially what the

hunch is there but yeah

wowzers what do you think

It is staggering.

I guess it's the flip side

danger of centralising everything.

I mean, in China, you can't...

can't use their trains you

can't be a foreign national

without registering your

passport you can't pay for

things without passport you

can't access wi-fi it's

illegal to access wi-fi

without your password

identification details so

you know they're all

centrally stored their

firewall itself springy elite like

Is this at the perimeter?

It needs to have that

session detail of who

you're logged on with

before you're allowed out

of the internet.

So if you're accessing the wider internet,

it's all traceable.

And therefore,

those records are essentially available.

And yeah, I don't know.

If you stick everything in one place,

then there is that danger.

But with it comes great power.

I mean, you know, the social...

controls are absolute.

No one misses lives in China.

But, yeah, you could lose everything.

Like, yeah, I don't know.

Maybe my details are in

there because of my trip last year.

Oh, you were in there, yeah.

You were actually in there.

Oh, you checked the records?

I did, yeah, yeah, I checked the records.

And, yeah, I mean, it was a bit shocking,

some of the gambling habits

that you've got.

Yeah.

I did use an eSIM which had

a VPN outside of the perimeter.

It's very weird.

China allows you.

So all phones,

it's illegal to have an

unlocked phone in China

unless you're a foreign national.

And then if you are a foreign national,

you can connect via

a place in Hong Kong or one

of the other providers that

kind of gives you access

without the great firewall.

Because otherwise all your

services at home stop working.

You can't use, you know, WhatsApp.

You can't use Google.

You can't log on to Google Maps.

You can't use your email.

You can't, literally nothing works.

So they're kind of saying, oh yeah,

we'll allow foreign

nationals through with eSIMs,

but we won't allow those

phones to be used by nationals.

crazy I don't know I I don't

know what it I don't know

what it says it's a

complete um yeah so whether

it's a disaster or whether

it's advertising I don't

know well at first I was

like that sounds a bit

suspect was it like a honey

trap and then kind of did a

little bit of digging to

see if there was any signs

of a honey trap in there

you know like um telemetry or um

basically monetization stuff

was the malware or anything

calling home or any signs

of anything in there.

There's nobody also claiming

to own that data or

claiming to have hacked that data.

So there's no announcement

of anything either.

And as maybe it's like

foreign intelligence,

maybe they'll see how the

data gets used and by who

it gets used by.

And are people going to

start contacting people in

this data where they

deliberately put certain

information in it to see

what tools get used,

how they'll sift through that data,

how they'll identify actors, i.e.

maybe fake actors that look

useful to foreign

intelligence and then see

that we then reach out to

those people and what we

then do to those people.

And that just seems a little

bit maybe possibly correct.

But then I think then given

all the other information,

I just think it was an accident.

I think you're saying I

think they're so locked down and secure.

There is all this data surveillance data,

like you're saying,

and someone just basically fucked up.

I think they just put the data on,

didn't secure it, didn't lock it down.

provisioned something and

boom it was on the old webs

and got uh got spotted did

you know did you find out

any of the details um for

where it was actually

hosted what provider or

whether it's just entirely

private government yeah

alibaba cloud or was it yeah

so and uh and uh l marshall

username attached to it um

it's weird I don't know

apparently cursor read

somebody somebody was

chatting to cursor and

asked it to get a database

I put cursor in euro mode

and thought wow this is

brilliant it will call all

the tools automatically and

I won't need to approve

them all and then it will

get my work done quicker

yeah that's what they could

see there was like some ai

talking to alibaba cloud

called el marshall

But, yeah.

I mean, the WeChat and Alipay records,

like,

eight hundred and six million records,

you know,

seven hundred and eighty million

residential addresses,

six hundred and thirty bank details.

I mean,

six hundred thirty million bank details.

I mean, like, what does that even mean?

Does that mean there's, like,

half a billion people plus that

now have to change their

credit detail I mean they

don't have credit cards in

uh china it's a bit

different it's kind of all

wechat and alipay um and if

you're not on either of

those you can't really buy

anything because it's all

qr codes based to those

platforms so it might be

short you know a

short-lived tokens only and

it might you know the bank

dls might not be usable

I don't know.

It's interesting.

What's the difference?

Yeah, I think, like you're saying,

I think mostly probably is

surveillance data.

It's happened before, though.

So Shanghai police data got leaked.

They had a database issue

then in twenty twenty two.

Same thing.

The base just didn't secure

things properly.

I think because sometimes

you are so perimeter based, you know,

you can't get in or out and

that's your security model.

then everything inside maybe

you're a little bit more

lackadaisical with it because you're like,

oh, well, you know, you can't get it out.

It's inside the firewall.

It's quite a big firewall.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like that mentality, though,

isn't it?

Well, I feel like we're already secure, so,

you know, we should be all right.

No one can get in or out.

We're tracking everybody in here,

so it's fine.

Yeah, it's fine.

The last one,

I'm not going to even talk

too much about the OpenAI one,

the Google one, just for time,

because I think, yeah,

it's pretty... They needed more compute,

decided to deal with Google.

We don't know how much.

Pretty, you know,

just trying to... They're

using CoreWeave.

Yeah, they're using CoreWeave.

And now they're using Google as well.

They'll probably use a bit of Amazon soon.

Probably use a bit of Amazon, yeah.

But...

There's been like a series D on Warcraft,

which is basically, sorry, Wondercraft,

which is basically the

exoskeleton based company,

robotics company as well.

And I have Eve,

which is like a

self-balancing personal exoskeleton.

So you can like control it

with joysticks or like

wrist based or on a device

if you're with somebody.

So it's to help people that

basically have maybe spinal issues,

can't walk, it's like paraplegics.

and it can walk for you I

think I don't know exactly

how it works but put legs

in you put your body in and

obviously it creates the

movement on your behalf but

they're saying actually is

very good um for

rehabilitation purposes um

and also just for

circulation and joints and

all these other things so

actually it's quite cool

and I've also got this

humanoid robot called calvin-forty

I think maybe for doing

dangerous tasks like

biohazard situations or whatever,

where you can use this

humanoid robot kind of

based on the same technology.

But yeah, I thought it was really cool.

Don't know what you think about it.

I thought it was quite a

cool little story.

Yeah, I watched the video.

I mean,

there's been self balancing stuff

for a long time,

but getting the the

software to drive it sensibly, you know,

it can

that they've had balancing for a while,

but getting a user to

clinically be allowed to

use such a precarious,

potentially two-legged

thing in real-world scenarios,

the fact that it's going

through clinical trials and

real people will be using it.

They'll be vulnerable people.

I mean,

it will either be elderly or

injured people.

or people with disabilities,

and that means they really

obviously need it to work,

and it's got to be safety critical.

So it's brilliant that that is happening,

and I think it's tangent

with the AI type of progress.

It means nowadays you can

infer with low enough power

that you can do useful things on devices,

like balancing in a critical way.

I think that is just...

shows the synergies between

real societal benefits of this tech.

It can get old, but

Maybe in the future you

won't have wheelchairs

because you'd want to stand up.

You'd want to be at normal height.

I don't know.

It's absolutely fascinating.

I'd really want to see a bit more.

I was rooting around quickly

as the episode started,

you might have noticed.

Trying to find the...

the tech behind their particular devices,

because there's been a

whole bunch of startups and

companies in the space of

sensing intent from muscle nerves.

Yeah, I was reading about it.

So you can train to send the

intent and pick up the very

faint signals on a whole

bunch of nerve endings

without an invasive.

We also have neural link advancements,

which is basically now you can

literally control things

through your mind which is

insane and I evidenced that

with the neural linkers and

I think in the in the

latest launches the

progression has been but I

thought it was like yeah

whatever all bit crazy what

a crazy idea but actually

the guy nolan who who's had

it as the first patient but

there's um a couple now and

like that shows the the

ultimate end result of a

paraplegic or somebody

who's had a spinal injury

could potentially be cured in the future.

Yeah,

with the combination of all these

different things,

you think actually you can really see...

Robots being used in

clinical settings to add in

parts to humans so that

they can have the bandwidth

to use robotic parts.

It's all gaining momentum

and adding a lot.

People being able to train

or use exoskeletons or go to

unsafe areas or train

robots so that they can

learn what a human would be

doing with ultra low latency, you know,

without a weird setup and

learn very quickly before

then being self-taught and

learning in virtual

environments and all that.

it all relates and does.

I'm,

I'm looking forward to becoming the

new Tony Stark of Avenger

based flying around in your suits,

you know,

lasers zooming about in your rocket suit.

Um, you know, you're a bit of a,

what am I doing?

You could, you could pull off,

you could pull off a, what's his name?

It's, uh,

Iron Man.

You could pull off.

Tony Stark is his.

Yeah.

Iron Man.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't

what you wanted to say of what I am.

Paranoid.

Paranoid.

But anyway, that is all of the news.

As usual, been fun and interesting.

Well,

not like we're going to blow our own

trumpets, but we just did.

But yeah,

hopefully we shall speak to you

next time in the next episode.

I'll be in France or may skip it.

I'll have to see how things go.

So I may have to skip next week,

but hopefully not.

I'll take my stuff to France

and hopefully can record one.

keep in touch have a good

holiday and uh we'll do

we'll we'll pick up if if

we do the episode cool

adios see you later