“I woke up. I said to Fable 5, keep going. It returned an error. I said, keep going again. It returned an error. I went on Twitter. Fable access had been cut off. And suddenly I had lost a skill set.”

80,000 Hours Podcast · October 2026

Milton runs a hardware company in Sheffield. He describes three days of using a frontier AI model for electronics and mechanical design, then losing access overnight. His worry is that in a compute crunch the US prioritizes domestic users and countries like the UK get cut off.

80,000 Hours Podcast · 2026-10-23 Listen to the episode → More from Tom Milton →

Transcript

80,000 Hours Podcast Around 1:44:11 into the episode

Tom Milton

…I also think that our team have honed lots of skills that don't get honed if you live in the bay. There's like honest, good delivery that always works. I mean, the place where this changes is if Frontier AI becomes really important to our delivery pipeline and the UK doesn't get access anymore.

Tom Reed

That's the existential threat, essentially.

Tom Milton

So we already saw this. I had my three days of claused psychosis where I was using the AI systems to do all of this electronics design and mechanical design. And then it was a Saturday morning. I woke up. I said to Fable 5, keep going. It returned an error. I said, keep going again. It returned an error. I went on Twitter. Fable access had been cut off. And suddenly I had lost a skill set. I had the previous day been able to do some electronic design and then I had reverted and I no longer had this skill. And imagine building a company on that. If you're building a company on having access to this intelligence and it gets taken away just like that, that is catastrophic. And my worry would be that as Frontier AI becomes more and more capable, we will, the first thing will be we'll…

Tom Reed

building ultra-secure compute in the UK would be like an absolute priority.

Tom Milton

I think the case against this is whether or not you actually need the frontier of capabilities. Like, do are our engineers fantastic? Yes. Are they literally the best people in the world at electronic design? It's like, I don't know, maybe. But possibly not. Was it okay that we had person number 10…

Tom Reed

an infinite dose response curve. Exactly. So

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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