To: US Govt, major govts, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Citi, Tencent, IBM, & 10,000+ more recipients…
From: Dr Alan D. Thompson <LifeArchitect.ai>
Sent: 18/Aug/2025
Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English
AGI: 94%
ASI: 0/50 (no expected movement until post-AGI)Atlassian CEO and founder Scott Farquhar (30/Jul/2025):
’AI is going to change [every country]. Every person should be using AI daily for as many things as they can. Like any new technology, it will feel awkward to start with, but every business person, every business leader, every government leader, and every bureaucrat should be using it.’
The winner of The Who Moved My Cheese? AI Awards! for Aug/2025 is Illinois, USA Governor Jay Robert "JB" Pritzker, who recently signed a bill into law banning AI in the state: ‘The people of Illinois deserve quality healthcare from real, qualified professionals and not computer programs that pull information from all corners of the internet to generate responses that harm patients.’ [Sidenote: Frontier models at this time were o3, Gemini-2.5-Pro, Claude 4…]
We have a hefty Policy section in this edition. With recent model releases, my ‘daily driver’ models have changed quite a bit. The list is updated frequently, always available to full subscribers in downloads and highlights, and shown in the Toys to Play With section near the end of this edition.
Contents
The BIG Stuff (Merge Labs BMI, Synchron BMI + iPad debut, Genie 3…)
The Interesting Stuff (Grok 4.20, Babuschkin exits, Wells Fargo, Waymo 99%…)
Policy (Anthropic copyright, police AI reports, DOGE, US vs China, GPT-5 jailbreaks…)
Toys to Play With (Models I use, Harmony response format, Eleven Music…)
Things I’ve Been Thinking About (A new compressed, international language…)
Next (Gemini 3.0, roundtable…)
The BIG Stuff
Solace: Superintelligence and goodness (4/Aug/2025)
My latest paper explores the relationship between high intelligence and high ethics scores, covering both human and artificial intelligence. Exceptional intelligence systematically correlates with moral sensitivity, and LLMs now exhibit ethical reasoning akin to advanced human moral development. This convergence suggests that as AI becomes more intelligent, it also becomes more aligned with human values of fairness and kindness, offering reassurance about the future of AI.
Read the paper (with PDF and video options): https://lifearchitect.ai/solace/
Here’s the main chart based on separate studies by Microsoft and Miraca Gross:
Exclusive: Frontier AI model highlights in China (Aug/2025)
One of the benefits of extended Q&A during workshops and consulting is listening to queries and concerns from around the room. There seems to be a lot of renewed interest in Chinese models, and one of my Fortune 500 clients recently requested a keynote with a focus on this, which led to my new viz. Looking at this alongside the usual Models Table viz (the ‘big 5’ in the US), China has something more like a ‘big 16’, each model comparable with GPT.
Source (with PDF option): https://lifearchitect.ai/models-table/
Synchron debuts the first thought-controlled iPad experience using Apple’s new BCI Human Interface Device protocol (4/Aug/2025)
Melbourne-founded Synchron has unveiled a groundbreaking demonstration of an iPad controlled entirely by thought, utilizing Apple’s Brain-Computer Interface Human Interface Device (BCI HID) protocol. The demonstration features Mark, a participant with ALS, who navigates the iPad using thought alone, showcasing a significant advancement in assistive technology. This achievement highlights the potential for thought-driven interfaces to become mainstream in human-computer interaction, promising a future where cognitive input seamlessly integrates into everyday devices.
Read more via Patently Apple.
Watch the video (link):
I presented the Synchron BMI and more for the opening keynote of the 31st International Symposium on Psychiatry. That keynote is available to full subscribers in downloads and highlights, and there is a separate BMI page: https://lifearchitect.ai/bmi/
Exclusive: Gemma 3 270M: The compact model for hyper-efficient AI (14/Aug/2025)
Gemma 3 270M, a new compact model from Google’s Gemma family, has set a new record with its impressive tokens-to-params ratio of 22,223:1, managing 270 million parameters trained on 6 trillion tokens of text data. The data ratio for Gemma 3 270M is the highest ever seen on my Models Table for text models going all the back to the original Transformer model in 2017.
Years ago, my 2022 Chinchilla data viz was published in the paper ‘Current Best Practices for Training LLMs from Scratch’, by Weights & Biases (as used by OpenAI). That viz maxes out at 519:1, so we might have to shift many screens to the right to show this model’s 22,223:1 ratio (or I suppose we could just change the logarithmic scale).
Read more: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-gemma-3-270m/
View the repo: https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-3-270m-it
The Memo features in recent AI papers by Microsoft and Apple, has been discussed on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and a trusted source says it is used by top brass at the White House. Across over 100 editions, The Memo continues to be the #1 AI advisory, informing 10,000+ full subscribers including RAND, Google, and Meta AI. Full subscribers have complete access to all 25+ AI analysis items in this edition!
The Swedish Prime Minister asks AI for advice on the job ‘quite often’ (3/Aug/2025)