South Yorkshire will not reindustrialise through just talk. It will happen when people with capital, technology, skills and authority decide to build. And that's what The Digital Forge is for. We put founders, investors, engineers, manufacturers and civic leaders in the same room, then focus on the work that turns industrial ambition into companies, jobs and growth. @SouthYorksMayor @olivercoppard Mayor @SouthYorksMCA, will join us as a keynote speaker at Reindustrialising the North on 10 September. Oliver has made place central to his mayoralty. South Yorkshire secured the country’s first Investment Zone. The Don Valley Corridor is a 30-year commitment stretching from Attercliffe and Tinsley into Rotherham. This matters because reindustrialisation will not come from another national slogan. It will come from local institutions backing real businesses, real infrastructure and real technology. Oliver joins Master Cutler Professor Keith Jackson CEng CDir, who will open the evening, alongside @DrGrahamCooley, Chris Borrett (@mercia_PLC), Giles Moore, @PeteHopton and Dr Rachel Smith (@RAEngNews_) The room matters as much as the platform. These are the people who fund, design, build and govern the next industrial economy. No hype. No silver bullets. Just the work. 📍 Cutlers’ Hall, Sheffield 📅 Thursday 10 September 🎟️ Book your place: luma.com/xkr9ljwj Thank you to @RathbonesGroup, Shillito Group, @YorkshireAI, @SHMAlegal and The Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire for supporting The Digital Forge CIC. #reindustrialisingTheNorth #advancedManufacturing #southYorkshire #industrialStrategy #theDigitalForge

In 2013 a group of researchers from Berkeley came to see me in Silicon Valley. They were not on my calendar by accident. They were there because of Konstantin Boudnik. Everybody called him Cos. He'd joined us that year, running advanced technologies and open source development, which in practice meant R&D. Cos was one of the early developers of Apache Hadoop and a co-creator of Apache Bigtop, which packages, tests and validates components across the Hadoop ecosystem. He was close enough to Hadoop to recognise where its original processing model was beginning to fail. He knew Ion Stoica and Ali Ghodsi, and he was insistent. Meet them, he said. This is going to be the future. Consider what that meant, coming from him. A man whose work was closely bound up with Hadoop, telling his chief executive to go and look hard at the technology most likely to displace part of it. Not many people do that. Most of us defend the thing we built long after the evidence has turned. So they came in. Ion Stoica, who would become Databricks' first chief executive. Ali Ghodsi, then VP of Engineering. They had built Spark in the AMPLab and were looking for funding for an academic project. On Thursday that company closed $5 billion at a $190 billion valuation. Cos was right about the direction. What none of us saw, including him, was the scale. For four years afterwards nobody wanted Spark. They toured Silicon Valley giving it away free. The answer came back the same every time. It's academic, a student wrote it, the student will leave. Then in October 2014 they sorted 100 terabytes in 23 minutes on 206 EC2 machines, against a Hadoop result of 72 minutes on 2,100, from disk not memory. The industry changed its mind overnight. This week Ghodsi made a bigger claim than the valuation. He says AGI already arrived, on the definition researchers used before 2022, and that the reason your company looks unchanged is not intelligence. It is context. A brilliant mind in a locked room can reason about anything you describe to it and knows nothing about your ledger. And then the thing I cannot stop thinking about, which is not from Silicon Valley at all. An AI law firm at Yorkshire AI Labs applied for professional indemnity cover. The underwriters asked their principals to come to London and explain the system. Every question was about people. Can this be overridden by a human? We assumed they wanted reassurance a human was in charge. They were confirming the opposite. Every place a person could intervene was another place something could go wrong. The quote came back 50% lower. British guidance defaults to human oversight. One underwriter has just priced the opposite. One quote is a signal, not a market, but it forces the right question. Full issue, free: thesundaysignal.ai Podcast: open.spotify.com/show/4CZ8zk… podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcas… youtube.com/@TheSundaySignal

Washington built a wall. Beijing walked round it. America's wager was simple. Control the best silicon and you preserve the lead in intelligence. Nearly four years on, Chinese laboratories are still constrained. They have not stopped. They changed the engineering objective. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 delivers near-frontier performance at posted prices well below the leading American models. It has not made intelligence free. It has made scarcity a much harder story to sell. That matters when OpenAI and Anthropic carry nearly $2 trillion of private valuation between them, and both have now filed to go public. But this week's issue is really about Britain. Cheaper intelligence should be a British windfall. We have Europe's largest AI ecosystem by company value, the world's third-largest AI talent pool, and a record $12.6 billion invested into British AI in six months. Then look at who owns it. Around half of the venture capital funding British AI comes from the United States. 57p of every pound generated at exit flows back across the Atlantic. Of the money raised in rounds above $250 million this year, only 16% came from British investors. In Friday's Yorkshire Post I wrote about Tommy Flowers, who built the world's first programmable electronic computer largely at his own expense, and was then ordered to burn the drawings in a boiler at Dollis Hill. He later asked the Bank of England for a loan to build another one. They refused, because they did not believe such a machine could work. He had built ten of them and was not allowed to say so. The machine was never the asset. The asset is what sits around it: distribution, proprietary workflows, customer trust and ownership. Britain keeps inventing the future. The question is whether we intend to own any of it. New issue live now, free to read: open.substack.com/pub/davidj…

New episode of The Sunday Signal is live. Issue #66: The Machine Was Never the Asset. On 16 July a Beijing lab most British executives had never heard of released an open-weight AI model that joined the leading proprietary systems. Eleven days later it published the weights. Within a fortnight the White House had accused it of stealing American intellectual property and more than 270 technology companies had signed a letter telling Washington to calm down. In this episode: A plain-English explanation of Mixture-of-Experts, the architecture that turned a compute constraint into an engineering advantage. What falling model prices do to nearly $2 trillion of American AI valuation, with @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI both filed confidentially for public listings. Where Britain actually stands, including the two numbers about British AI that never make it onto the slide. Tommy Flowers, who built the world's first programmable computer and was ordered to burn the drawings. And the Week 31 layoff tracker, where the headline number falls, the tech number rises, and AI is the leading stated reason for the fifth month running. Listen here: Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/4CZ8zk… Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcas… YouTube: youtube.com/@TheSundaySignal Full written issue, free: thesundaysignal.ai

In 1945 a brickies son from Poplar was ordered to burn the plans for the machine he had built. He did it, in a boiler at Dollis Hill. Tommy Flowers built the world's first programmable electronic computer. Most people have never heard of him, and that is not an accident. My column in today's @yorkshirepost tells the story. The Post Office engineer doubted by the Cambridge mathematicians. The man who paid for much of Colossus out of his own pocket. The inventor who, after the war, went to the @bankofengland for a loan to build another machine and was turned down because the bank did not believe such a thing could work. He had built ten of them. He was forbidden from saying so. America did the opposite. ENIAC was unveiled to the press on Valentine's Day 1946, and that summer the Moore School taught anyone who could get a seat how to build one. Within five years there was a commercial computer industry, and it was American. Britain's problem has never been a shortage of ideas. It is that we treat the invention as the achievement and the industry as somebody else's affair. @GoogleDeepMind went to @Google. @Arm went to @SoftBank. Britain now says it will lead the world in AI. The question worth asking is who will own it when we do. I write about AI, industry and British ambition every week in The Sunday Signal. The next issue lands this Sunday. Subscribe now and it will arrive in your inbox. Link in comments.

For almost 170 years, Sheffield FC’s identity evolved. Not once did it lose sight of where it came from. This image tells that story better than any press release. From the earliest years, when Victorian football clubs didn’t even wear badges, through every subsequent crest, the club built on its heritage rather than replacing it. Different artwork. Different styles. Different eras. But the same thread ran through them all: history, continuity and respect for the world’s oldest football club. Then came 2026. The shield disappeared. The footballers disappeared. Much of the symbolism disappeared. A visual identity that had evolved over generations was replaced in a single step. This isn’t about resisting change. Every great institution should evolve. But evolution respects the past. It doesn’t sever the connection to it. When you are the world’s oldest football club, your badge isn’t just a logo. It is part of football’s history. Which brings me to one simple question. The Football Governance Act 2025 recognises a club’s crest as part of its heritage. Section 49 states that a regulated club must not make a material change to its crest unless it has taken reasonable steps to establish that the change is supported by a majority of its supporters in England and Wales. Did @sheffieldfc take those reasonable steps? If so, publish the consultation process and the results. Supporters deserve to see the evidence. If not, the Board should think again. The world’s oldest football club deserves nothing less. #swfc #sufc #twitterblades

A bad marriage can at least end in divorce. A bad deal, a bad contract, a bad investor? Much harder. That’s the argument in my @yorkshirepost column today. Founders are told raising money is the victory. It isn’t. The wrong capital can cost you the company. Equity is not control. If you do not control the board, you do not control the company. The sinking feeling is data. In this week’s Sunday Signal I’m also looking at the AI energy problem, the grid, and the British company trying to change the trade-off between computing power and electricity demand. link below

Most professionals think they’re ahead on AI. They’re not. Using ChatGPT faster doesn’t protect you. Building with AI does. 0.04% of humanity are builders. The rest are experimenting. AI doesn’t need to replace you. It only needs to reduce the number required. User or builder? Read more here: newsletter.djr.ai/p/the-sund… [image credit: @damianplayer]

Also available as a podcast: Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=-yu7ejQn… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1Jj… Amazon: music.amazon.com/podcasts/e6…

𝐀𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤’𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫, 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐦𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲.⁣⁣ It hallucinates. It makes mistakes. It still needs humans. All true. But this week markets repriced billions of pounds of value around one simple question: What happens when the cost of producing software collapses? @IBM dropped double digits in a day. @TheBlockCo (@Jack) removed 4,000 employees and investors rewarded it. SaaS businesses built on per-seat pricing are being reassessed. Inside @YorkshireAI Labs, we are already modelling new ventures around radically lower engineering headcount. Not theory. Capital allocation. This week’s Sunday Signal breaks down what the markets are signalling. The loom did not need to be perfect. It needed to be cheaper. Full issue here: open.substack.com/pub/davidj…

𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐞𝐬. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐨.⁣ ⁣ ⁣This week @elonmusk did something most leaders talk about but rarely do. He killed the @TheTeslaModelS & Model X. Not because they failed. Not because they stopped selling. But because they were in the way. Alex Ferguson understood this instinct better than anyone. He sold @JaapStam, David Beckham, @RvN1776 , even @Cristiano, not after decline, but at the peak. A year early rather than a year too late. The system mattered more than the star. Tesla is claiming to do the same. The Model S was credibility. The Model X was spectacle. Model 3 and Y are the system players. @Tesla_Optimus is not a replacement. It is a formation change. That takes nerve. But nerve is not the same thing as judgment. The Innovator’s Dilemma is not solved by being ruthless. It is solved by being right about what people will actually value next. Kodak failed by clinging to the past. Tesla risks something different. Letting go of a working present before the future is ready to pay for it. This week’s Sunday Signal is about that knife-edge. When killing your heroes saves you. And when it quietly destroys what made you great. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐒𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐚𝐥: 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐊𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐞𝐬 (𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐓𝐨)⁣ newsletter.djr.ai/p/the-sund… #MUFC #manunited #innovatorsdilemma #Tesla

This is where the game began. Before global leagues, television deals or billionaire owners, football was written down here. These are the original Laws of the Game, set out in #Sheffield in the 19th century. Not a marketing story. Not mythology. The foundation document of the world’s most popular sport. Sheffield isn’t just another football city. It is the birthplace of the modern game. That matters. Not as nostalgia, but as responsibility. Cities all over the world spend fortunes trying to invent a story that gives them global relevance. Sheffield already has one. It’s authentic, provable, and woven into the fabric of the sport played by billions of people every week. The question is whether we choose to protect, invest in and project that history, or allow it to sit quietly in archives while others build the future. Heritage like this doesn’t preserve itself. It needs stewardship. It needs ambition. And it needs to be treated as a civic asset, not a footnote. This isn’t just about football. It’s about Sheffield’s place in the world. And that is worth getting right.

𝐂-𝟑𝐏𝐎 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥.⁣ In 1977, when @starwars hit cinemas, C-3PO felt safely ridiculous. A humanoid robot fluent in millions of languages, capable of instant calculation and awkward social interaction. A fussy golden protocol droid designed for comic relief. It worked because it was impossible. This week in the @yorkshirepost, I argue that in 2026, none of that feels implausible anymore. Humanoid robots are no longer stage props or lab experiments. They are already working in factories and warehouses. The next step is the home. Not as novelties, but as cleaners, carers, assistants and eventually medical aides. Early versions will be clumsy and limited. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. Project forward 10 to 20 years and the real question is not whether robots enter our homes, but what happens when they do. How ageing societies cope. How labour shortages are filled. How trust, care and work itself are redefined. C-3PO turns out not to have been science fiction at all, but an early sketch of a future we are now building. 📰 Column in this week’s Yorkshire Post

#Sheffield gave the world football. And then forgot to defend it. This week I went public about something that should shame us all: The world’s oldest football club, founded in 1857, is being allowed to drift into irrelevance while other cities monetise a story that began here. My group made two bids for Sheffield FC - The World’s First Football Club. Serious bids. Properly structured. Fully funded. Backed by patient capital measured in the hundreds of billions. Not speculation. Not leverage. Not hype. Both were rejected. This was never about “buying a club”. It was about anchoring long-term institutional investment into South Yorkshire using football heritage as the platform: jobs, tourism, regeneration, a Home of Football museum worthy of the name, and a stadium that reflects the scale of the story. If this were the United States, Sheffield would be a pilgrimage site. Instead, we’ve hidden the origin story of the global game in plain sight. In the same week, something else became undeniable. 🤖 Humanoid robots are no longer a future problem. They are being priced like family cars and designed for kitchens, care and domestic life. This decade, not the next one. 🏔️ And Davos? Still congratulating itself in a Swiss bubble while the real work happens elsewhere. Three stories. One thread. Progress doesn’t come from panels, branding or nostalgia. It comes when capital, capability and heritage are aligned with intent and backbone. Sheffield now has a choice. To treat its football legacy as the global asset it is. Or to let others tell, own and monetise the story instead. Robots are coming whether we’re ready or not. Davos will carry on regardless. But football’s birthplace only gets one chance to decide whether it matters. Issue 38 of The Sunday Signal is live. Read it. Argue with it. Share it. #SundaySignal #Sheffield #HomeOfFootball #Leadership #AI #HumanoidRobots #Capital #Heritage #swfc #sufc #sheffieldfc #homeoffootball open.substack.com/pub/davidj…