Letters VI
2025 in review, cyber-physical potential, robot rave, poisoning attacks, chip-level verification, a global nature observatory
Dear friend of SoTA,
In this edition, we bring you an overview of SoTA’s progress in 2025, along with 11 letters from individuals and teams driving technological advancement for the UK and beyond. We’re also requesting your input on:
Our new series of Frontiers Nights
Our project with ARIA to shape an R&D agenda around deploying AI in the physical world (see the first letter below and contact trust@ilikethefuture.com)
Frontiers Nights
Thank you to everyone who joined our first Frontiers Night on Forecasting. We had brilliant talks, demos and case studies with a lively discussion between the founders of Mantic, Electric Twin and the Swift Centre, graciously hosted by Faculty. We’ll share recordings with participants soon.
Please continue to send suggestions for future themes and demonstrators to frontiers@ilikethefuture.com as we plan for 2026.
Our next one will be on AI for scientific discovery (self-driving labs), so let us know if you want to demo and share your work with our members. Academics, founders, and independent researchers/tinkerers are all welcome.
2025 in review
This year we held 10 events. Our hackathons focused on the untapped tech tree – branches of technoscience we believe to be unexplored or underexploited relative to their importance – including geoengineering, embodied intelligence, AI interpretability, and human augmentation.
We also looked at how technologists can reboot state capacity. With Civic Future, we held a panel discussion between individuals who drove progress within the British government and NATO by creating new, more agile structures with unique mandates, somewhat shielded from institutional inertia. We then held a hackathon centred on critical challenges facing the government, bringing together developers and civil servants.
Our youngest competitor was 12 and won the Novelty Prize at Weather Control, our geoengineering hackathon. Other events like Fail Friday focused on expanding the risk tolerance of technical talent, normalising failure as an essential part of pursuing ambitious quests. Thanks to all the volunteers, advisors, judges and sponsors who supported these events.
SoTA Letters grew to 2,000 subscribers and more than 60,000 direct reads.
We received brilliant letters from technologists advancing the frontier: from Lee Cronin (CEO, Chemify), Ola Wlodek (CEO, Constructive Bio) and Jessica Rumbelow (CEO, Leap Labs), to James Baghurst & Calum Drysdale (winners of the robotics hack), Pia Park & Enrico Bottazzi (winners of the defence tech hack), and Nitish Mital & Simon Malzard (winners of the mechinterp hack).
SoTA received a direct appeal from 10 Downing Street for our members to “fundamentally rewire the state”. We also heard from the Advanced Research + Invention Agency about cultivating small circles of innovators; from the Incubator for AI on developing and fielding new capabilities to modernise public services inside-out; and in this edition, from the AI Security Institute on evaluating model vulnerabilities such as data poisoning in LLMs.
SoTA won an Emergent Ventures grant from Tyler Cowen in a tranche partially funded by Renaissance Philanthropy and Founders Pledge. It’s powering more events to develop our community of scientists, researchers, engineers and technologists who are optimistic about the future and actively building it.
See the first and second letters below for more exciting news relating to our work with ARIA and how we intend to celebrate our second birthday in January.
Letters
With our final edition of the year, Letters VI, we present the following letters to our community:
Unlocking Cyber-Physical Potential with ARIA, Jamie, Matvey & Oliver (SoTA needs your input!)
The Robot Rave, Matvey & Jamie (join us to celebrate our birthday)
Poisoning Attacks on LLMs, Alexandra Souly, Xander Davies, Robert Kirk & Abby D’Cruz (AI Security Institute)
Creating GNSS Redundancy with Quantum, Alex Jantzen (Aquark Technologies)
Decoding Nature’s Chemistry, Tess Bevers & David Kubanek (Novogaia)
Provable Hardware Trust for AI, Connor Dunlop (Lucid Computing)
Beyond DNA Sequencing, Paola Garran Garcia
Predictive Infrastructure for Nature, Kaja A Wasik
Clothes and Controllers, Kirill Sechkar
Engineering Serendipity with palendr, Lily Geidelberg & Aeron Laffere (palendr)
Modernising Ancient Coptic Tradition, Daniel Kamel
We’re always accepting submissions on letters@ilikethefuture.com. We want to hear about your technoscientific missions – novel ideas, derided theories, engineering stories and technical explainers on what you’re discovering, inventing and building.
Ad astra (and Merry Christmas),
Jamie, Matvey, Rob, Levan
Congrats on the Emergent Ventures grant and strong year. The 'untapped tech tree' framing is spot on - we tend to over-index on what's already legible and underfund these branches. I've been workingon embodied systems and there's a surprising amountof low-hanging fruit just sitting there, mostly cuz people assume the field is saturated when it's not.