National Apprenticeship Week 2025 with BT Group, Vodafone & Virgin Media O2
The telecoms industry needs more young people to join the sector. With 60% of engineers over 50 and demands for connectivity increasing, now is a good time for young people and career changers to consider a career in connectivity.
UKTIN Talent [delivered by WM5G] is hosting an exclusive online event as part of National Apprenticeship Week.
Join BT Group, Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 and their apprentices, who will be discussing the broad range of apprenticeship roles from level 2 to level 7, tech and non tech, plus the amazing perks and benefits on offer.
Schools, colleges, teachers, careers leads and parents/carers are most welcome to join us.
Early booking recommended: Link
Any queries please contact clare.mckee@wm5g.org.uk UKTIN Talent Lead
The Bristol Distinguished Address Series (BDAS)
BDAS will be back in 2025 with our spring series, which promises an exciting list of speakers and participants. To be the first to hear when tickets are released for each event, please join our mailing list.
Browse our previous events to watch video and recordings from our successful autumn series and conversations from earlier series. We look forward to seeing you at one of our events soon.
All of the addresses from 2024
State of AI report
The State of AI Report analyses the most interesting developments in AI. We aim to trigger an informed conversation about the state of AI and its implication for the future. The Report is produced by AI investor Nathan Benaich and Air Street Capital.
- Research: Technology breakthroughs and their capabilities.
- Industry: Areas of commercial application for AI and its business impact.
- Politics: Regulation of AI, its economic implications and the evolving geopolitics of AI.
- Safety: Identifying and mitigating catastrophic risks that highly-capable future AI systems could pose to us.
- Predictions: What we believe will happen and a performance review to keep us honest.
- Frontier lab performance begins to converge and proprietary models lose their edge, as the gap between GPT-4 and the rest closes. OpenAI o1 put the lab back at the top of the charts – but for how long?
- Planning and reasoning take priority in LLM research, as companies explore combining LLMs with reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithms, and self-improvement to unlock future agentic applications.
- Foundation models demonstrate their ability to break out of language, supporting multimodal research across mathematics, biology, genomics, the physical sciences, and neuroscience.
- US sanctions have limited effects on Chinese labs’ ability to produce capable models, as a combination of stockpiles, approved hardware, smuggling, and cloud access allow them to build highly performant (V)LLMs. Meanwhile, China’s efforts to build a domestic semiconductor industry remain scrambled.
- The enterprise value of AI companies has hit $9T, as public companies experience a bull market for AI exposure. Investment in private AI companies also increased, but by an order of magnitude less, despite GenAI megarounds in the US.
- A handful of AI companies begin to generate serious revenue, including foundation model builders and start-ups working on video and audio generation. However, as models get cheaper as part of the corporate land-grab, questions around long-term sustainability go unanswered.
- The pseudo-acquisition emerges as an off-ramp for AI companies, as some companies struggle to find a viable business model as staying at the frontier proves costly.
- The existential risk discourse has cooled off, especially following the abortive coup at OpenAI. However, researchers have continued to deepen our knowledge of potential model vulnerabilities and misuse, proposing potential fixes and safeguards.
Girl Geek Dinners call for hosts
As many of you know – we have been running Girl Geek Dinners meetups in Bristol since 2010. Its a great group and great to get support from companies in the area who have always hosted us. It doesn’t take a lot to host a meetup, all we need is a speaker (female) who works in the tech industry, some food and drink and you get to advertise your company and meet loads of fabulous women working in the industry or others that are interested in finding out more about what the industry has to offer. If you are interested in hosting then please get in contact on info@wthub.org.
We look forward to hearing from you and a big thanks to all previous hosts and supporters.