Some updates from SoTA

Rebooting State Capacity winners; our next hackathons; write to our community

Dear SoTA,

We’re writing to inform you of the winners of our recent hackathon, invite you to two more, and request your submissions for the third edition of SoTA Letters (this online journal).

• Winners of the Rebooting State Capacity Hackathon

• More SoTA hackathons in May & June: Weather Control, Embodied Intelligence

• Letters to SoTA: insights, essays, launches, calls for collaborators

The Rebooting State Capacity Hackathon

Government owns or touches many of the world’s hardest problems, the kind that our community of ambitious techno-optimists thrives upon. We recently held the Rebooting State Capacity Hackathon to generate solutions targeting real-world problems and capability gaps across the British government, with SoTA’s developers, engineers, researchers and technologists building alongside civil servants.

The event kicked off with interactive sessions led by Palantir and PUBLIC, setting a high-energy tone focused on unlocking growth and leveraging technology to strengthen state capacity across key government functions — from health and education to transport and national security. Participants drew on insights from advisers with deep experience building in and for the highest levels of government, and presented live demos of their technical prototypes to an audience of fellow builders and government officials.

We’ve received extremely encouraging testimonials from frontline operators who tested solutions, and are booking meetings across the government to discuss next steps…

Congratulations to our champions:

1. Treasury Busters (£1,000) - Dynamic single source of truth to build and approve/reject business cases for major spending projects in months, not decades.

2. DVSA Reimagined (£500) - Streamlined process for most young people’s first touchpoint with the government, getting a driving license.

3. A1 Voice (£250) - Smart voice-mailbox for NHS hospitals, managing the over 10,000 phone calls per day to clinical departments.

And to the recipients of the Basis Prize for ‘Outcompeting the Government’ (another £1,000): A1 Voice again, who managed to engage 17 departments across 6 NHS trusts!

Some honourable mentions:

• SCYLLA - Remote seabed sensing for critical undersea infrastructure using backscatter

• Hacknee - Collective intelligence for local council decision-making via prediction markets

• Fighting Crime, One Query at a Time - Automated analysis and reporting to democratise access to crime data

• Pranav - Visual odometry for mapping GPS-denied environments

• Seaguard - Small-vessel maritime detection using computer vision

We appreciate support from our partners, 10 Downing Street, the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, Basis, Delian Alliance Industries, Palantir, ElevenLabs, and PUBLIC, along with all the departments, agencies, and individual civil servants who provided challenges as a foundation for the hackathon. It’s a reason for optimism that so many in government had the open-mindedness to hand over their critical problems and explore solutions, especially during a sunny weekend with London Marathon traffic.

We look forward to seeing where these promising individuals and their prototypes go.

Our next hackathons: Weather Control & Embodied Intelligence

We are returning to untapped branches of the tech tree for our upcoming hackathons, both in London.

1. Weather Control, 31st May-1st June.

   The current pace of decarbonisation is too slow to prevent anthropogenic climate change, yet this frontier field is mired in controversy and uncertainty. Parts of the scientific community actively oppose any attempts to deepen our knowledge and understanding of ideas around modifying the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. They argue that it’s a distraction from decarbonisation and could create moral hazard by reducing incentives to accelerate other efforts.

   This hackathon will allow you explore the following legitimate concerns:

   • Can we accurately measure the effects of geoengineering/weather control technologies and safely control them?

   • Do we know how they can be practically implemented and scaled?

   • And ultimately, how can we ensure that their potential use is sensibly and fairly governed?

2. Embodied Intelligence, 14th-15th June.

   As disembodied AI systems face clear limitations in physical environments, robotics development is accelerating rapidly. Companies worldwide are competing to bring general-purpose robotics to the masses, and Hugging Face is lowering the barrier to entry with its open‑source, low-cost SO-ARM series and the LeRobot library.

   SoTA is therefore excited to host the London chapter of Hugging Face’s Worldwide Robotics Hackathon next month. Whether you plan to compete globally with an SO-ARM or arrive with a home-brewed contraption that bends conventional ‘robot’ definitions, all creations are welcome.

Write to SoTA

Finally, we are collecting submissions for the third edition of SoTA Letters. Share your insights with our community of over 600 technologists, founders, funders, and government officials. We want to hear your novel ideas, derided theories, visions of the future, and calls for collaborators on interesting projects and ventures.

Previous editions have included essays on the misallocation of Britain’s hardware talent, fixing higher education, and why the replication crisis means psychology needs a scientific rebirth, along with the launches of a new VC fund, a startup London factory and a new political party.

What else should we know? Email us on info@ilikethefuture.com by 30th May 2025.

Yours,

Jamie

Cofounder, SoTA