Britain's Third-Richest Person Says Government Is Killing Ambition And Growth
James Dyson at the WWD Beauty CEO Summit held at Cipriani South Street on May 07, 2025 in New York, ... More New York. (Photo by Katie Jones/WWD via Getty Images)
Britain's Labour government is pursuing a 'vindictive' agenda that threatens the future prosperity of the nation, according to James Dyson, one of the U.K.'s best-known business leaders.
'There are plenty of ambitious young entrepreneurs in this country,' Dyson wrote in a column in The Sun newspaper. 'But if the desire to be successful is punished, with tax and red tape, the talented and aspirational will take their ideas and leave. Those struggling to stay afloat will give up.'
He pointed out that his eponymous business is now based in Singapore, but it employs 2,000 people in Britain. In the last year on record, his company contributed £103 million ($139 million) in U.K. tax.
Dyson, who was knighted in 2006, is famous for developing high-tech reinventions of gadgets like vacuum cleaners, hand dryers and fans that sell in 85 different countries or territories.
Forbes estimates his current net worth at $15.3 billion, making him the third-wealthiest person from the U.K. on the World's Real-Time Billionaires ranking. But Dyson's success today is the result of an entrepreneurial journey characterized by resilience and determination.
Before his first bagless vacuum cleaner was ready for the mass market, he produced 5,127 prototypes, each made by hand. The thousands of hours (and dollars) he spent perfecting his first product brought him to the brink of bankruptcy.
And now he's worried that Britain 'no longer has the aspiration to create the Dysons of the future.'
Since Labour came to power in July last year, the government has raised taxes by more than £40 billion ($51 billion) and adopted reforms to the U.K.'s employment law, prompting many business groups to warn that the additional costs would result in job losses and higher prices for consumers.
Dyson said in January that the hike to the inheritance tax would destroy many family businesses and farms, a warning that he repeated in his latest opinion piece.
'Labour is out to destroy,' Dyson wrote. 'Those who aspire to create wealth and jobs, and those who grow our food, will all be punished. They hate those who set out to try, with hostility.'
A Treasury spokesperson said in response: 'We are a pro-business government. Economic activity is at a record high with 500,000 more people in employment since we entered office. We are protecting the smallest businesses from the employer National Insurance rise, shielding 250,000 retail, hospitality and leisure business properties from paying full business rates and have capped corporation tax at 25%--the lowest rate in the G7.
'We delivered a once-in-a-Parliament budget last year that took necessary decisions on tax to stabilize the public finances, including the NHS which has now seen waiting lists fall five months in a row.
'We are now focused on creating opportunities for businesses to compete and access the finance they need to scale, export and break into new markets."
Last week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the U.K. economy grew 0.7% in the three months to April 2025, compared with the prior quarter. But the nation's GDP contracted in April by 0.3% in the same month that Britain's higher employment taxes came into effect and Donald Trump unveiled his 'Liberation Day' tariffs.
The ONS also announced last week that the number of employees on payroll tumbled 109,000 in May, the biggest decline in almost four years. The figures took the total number of jobs lost since the October budget to 276,000.
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CNN
28 minutes ago
- CNN
Trump's intel chief Tulsi Gabbard is ‘off-message' and out of favor, sources tell CNN
Aboard Air Force One late Monday night, having hastily left the G7 meeting in Canada, President Donald Trump took questions from reporters about the escalating Israel-Iran conflict. In the back and forth, Trump was asked about Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, who testified to Congress in March that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon — a direct contradiction of Israel's claims that Iran was racing toward a bomb. 'I don't care what she said,' Trump replied. 'I think they were very close to having it.' Trump's terse rebuke of his top intelligence official set off a firestorm among the MAGA faithful on right-wing media, long divided over the issue of Iran. It also raised serious questions about Gabbard's standing in the administration. Just a month ago, White House officials insisted that the president not only liked Gabbard but enjoyed her company. Even as some in the administration believed that she was out of her depth, officials insisted that Trump and his team were giving Gabbard leeway to learn the ropes of her new job. But that tone has shifted, as multiple people inside the West Wing have grown disillusioned with Gabbard's performance, sources say. Though she's been among the most visible voices for the president's national security policy, behind the scenes Gabbard has struggled to carve out her own place in the Trump White House. Recently, Trump has come to see her as 'off message' when it comes to the conflict in the Middle East, according to one senior White House adviser. Trump's annoyance with Gabbard peaked earlier this month, this person said, when she posted a 3-minute video warning that the world is 'closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,' and blaming 'political elite and warmongers' for stoking fear and tensions between nuclear powers.' Trump viewed the video as a thinly veiled criticism of his consideration to allow Israel to strike Iran, and many inside the White House agreed Gabbard was speaking out of turn, the person added. 'When the president thinks you are off message, he doesn't want you in the room,' the senior White House adviser said. On Tuesday, the White House and Gabbard both sought to downplay the moment from Air Force One. Gabbard told reporters that she and the president were on 'the same page' on Iran, and the White House rapid response team shared a post on X documenting her comments. An ODNI official called the president and Gabbard's statements on Iran 'congruent,' noting 'just because Iran is not building a nuclear weapon right now, doesn't mean they aren't 'very close' as President Trump said.' 'This is just a lazy regurgitation of a fake news story that BOTH the White House and Vice President have already debunked,' Office of the Director of National Intelligence Press Secretary Olivia Coleman said in a statement. 'The Director remains focused on her mission: providing accurate and actionable intelligence to the President, cleaning up the Deep State, and keeping the American people safe, secure, and free.' Gabbard is among the newer members of Trump's orbit. A former Democratic congresswoman who forged common cause with the MAGA coalition in part because of its anti-interventionist posture, Gabbard was a frequent critic of Trump during his first term. She attacked him for pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and even accused him of 'an act of war' against Iran over his decision to kill a top Iranian general in 2020. Now, in near-weekly appearances on conservative cable news and in her regular social media feed, Gabbard exudes an image of the perfect MAGA warrior — physically fit, focused on weeding out 'deep state' haters and absolutely loyal to Trump. But in the White House, some Trump officials have begun to question whether she has fully grasped what the job of DNI actually entails, with its oversight of the government's sprawling intelligence community, two administration officials told CNN. 'It's an enormous job,' one administration official told CNN. 'She is still very much learning the ropes — and all the various areas that DNI touches.' Two days before she posted her nuclear war video, Gabbard was absent from a last-minute Camp David gathering of Trump's top national security officials to discuss Israel's plans to attack Iran. Among those present were Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Gabbard was on National Guard duty, according to an administration official, who said that the meeting had originally not been slated to address foreign policy. But one person familiar with the session said she wasn't invited because officials didn't feel her presence was required. Gabbard was back in the White House the Monday after the Camp David meeting, an administration official said. And this week, the White House deliberately moved a meeting to accommodate her schedule, said one official familiar with the episode. 'If they wanted her excluded, that's not what you do,' that person said. An ODNI official said that Gabbard has been at every Situation Room meeting since the conflict between Israel and Iran began last week. Gabbard maintains allies in the White House, in particular Vice President JD Vance, who issued a statement Tuesday calling her 'an essential member' of the team. When asked if Gabbard was in danger of getting fired, one senior White House official said that the president was hesitant to fire anyone, given the optics. 'He's not interested in firing her at this moment because she's not doing any harm,' the official said. 'I think he's questioning her viewpoint as a value, especially after that video.' Since taking office in February, Gabbard has been fighting to clear a path inside the thorny bureaucracy of the intelligence community. An ODNI official claimed to CNN that Gabbard has identified savings totaling approximately $150 million in contracts, including roughly $20 million by cutting diversity programs and roles. The job is a tall order for anyone: The DNI has a notoriously fuzzy mandate. Created after 9/11 to facilitate information sharing and coordination across the now-18 agencies that make up the intelligence community, the office lacks budgetary and operational authority over the CIA and the other agencies it nominally oversees. Past directors have struggled to define its role in the US government, and Trump officials have considered disbanding it entirely in both his first and second terms. Gabbard has sought to wrest control of the President's Daily Brief from the CIA. The powerful document has long been under the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but it was produced at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Now, Gabbard has directed the document to be put together at ODNI, located a few miles down the beltway from CIA, as part of what an official said was a streamlining effort designed to get vital intelligence in Gabbard's hands faster. In a job that is explicitly supposed to be apolitical, Gabbard has been overt in her public focus on Trump's political objectives. Former DOD official Alex Plitsas joins Abby at the magic wall to talk through what he sees as three military options that President Trump is likely considering on Iran. She launched a high-profile effort called the Director's Initiatives Group designed to look into political priorities of the president, including what the administration has deemed the 'weaponization' of the US intelligence community under the Biden administration. She's also fired top career officials she accused of leaking and participating in an office chat group devoted to trans support issues. Gabbard declassified documents about domestic terrorism in an effort to show the Biden administration targeted its political opponents, revoked security clearances for former intelligence officials critical of Trump, and made referrals to the Justice Department for criminal leak investigations. She also called for former FBI Director James Comey to be jailed after he posted an image of seashells that read '86 47' — a matter of domestic law enforcement, which the ODNI, as a foreign intelligence-focused organization, is not traditionally supposed to be involved in. Gabbard and her allies say she is working to restore trust in the US intelligence community by purging it of 'rot' that she says 'runs deep.' But inside the organization she leads, some career officials say Gabbard appears more focused on the image of leadership than actually leading. Like several others in the Trump administration, Gabbard has embraced an online persona that at times has more in common with a fitness influencer than the nation's spy chief. Her Instagram is punctuated with stylized photos of her working out. In one post in early May, she answered a comment from a follower who wanted to know what workout shoes she was wearing. There's also the sheer breadth of her media appearances. Gabbard is a regular guest on Fox News. On one occasion in late May, she appeared on the network for nearly half an hour. Multiple career officials who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity said it's not clear to the rank-and-file what Gabbard is doing day-to-day beyond posting to social media and trying to root out intelligence officials she believes have become 'politicized.' Her husband, a videographer named Abraham Williams, has appeared on campus and has been known to film Gabbard for her personal social media, according to two sources familiar with the pattern. Gabbard has surrounded herself with a small, insulated team that has largely cut senior career officials with experience running the agency out of the loop, sources familiar with the dynamic said. That has created a very small circle of people who have insight into her day-to-day running of the intelligence community. It's all made Gabbard somewhat of a Rorschach test: to her supporters, she's a MAGA warrior tackling entrenched corruption; to her opponents, she's a naive crusader, warping the ideal of apolitical intelligence in her zeal to support the president. Democrats say, far from depoliticizing the intelligence community, Gabbard is doing the opposite — wielding the office for Trump's own political advantage. By involving herself so directly in the politics of his administration, Gabbard risks compromising the objectivity and integrity of the intelligence analysis that national security leaders rely on to make decisions. The top Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees last week sent a letter to Gabbard demanding information on her decision to fire the top lawyer to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and place a 'senior advisor' in an office that is, under statute, supposed to conduct independent oversight of the intelligence community. And the firing of the top two officials on the National Intelligence Council — the senior most analytical group in the intelligence community, whose job it is to understand and assess the biggest threats facing the United States — has also drawn fierce scrutiny from Democrats and former intelligence officials. In April, one of Gabbard's top advisers, Joe Kent, demanded that the NIC 'update' an assessment that undercut the president's rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportations — an interference that former intelligence officials and Democratic members of Congress say was a disturbing example of a political leader inappropriately politicizing intelligence conclusions. 'She believes she was hired to do the political aspect of this job,' one source close to Gabbard told CNN.
WIRED
28 minutes ago
- WIRED
How Much Energy Does AI Use? The People Who Know Aren't Saying
Jun 19, 2025 6:00 AM A growing body of research attempts to put a number on energy use and AI—even as the companies behind the most popular models keep their carbon emissions a secret. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images 'People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses,' Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote in an aside in a long blog post last week. The average query, Altman wrote, uses 0.34 watt-hours of energy: 'About what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes.' For a company with 800 million weekly active users (and growing), the question of how much energy all these searches are using is becoming an increasingly pressing one. But experts say Altman's figure doesn't mean much without much more public context from OpenAI about how it arrived at this calculation—including the definition of what an 'average' query is, whether or not it includes image generation, and whether or not Altman is including additional energy use, like from training AI models and cooling OpenAI's servers. As a result, Sasha Luccioni, the climate lead at AI company Hugging Face, doesn't put too much stock in Altman's number. 'He could have pulled that out of his ass,' she says. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for more information about how it arrived at this number.) As AI takes over our lives, it's also promising to transform our energy systems, supercharging carbon emissions right as we're trying to fight climate change. Now, a new and growing body of research is attempting to put hard numbers on just how much carbon we're actually emitting with all of our AI use. This effort is complicated by the fact that major players like OpenAi disclose little environmental information. An analysis submitted for peer review this week by Luccioni and three other authors looks at the need for more environmental transparency in AI models. In Luccioni's new analysis, she and her colleagues use data from OpenRouter, a leaderboard of large language model (LLM) traffic, to find that 84 percent of LLM use in May 2025 was for models with zero environmental disclosure. That means that consumers are overwhelmingly choosing models with completely unknown environmental impacts. 'It blows my mind that you can buy a car and know how many miles per gallon it consumes, yet we use all these AI tools every day and we have absolutely no efficiency metrics, emissions factors, nothing,' Luccioni says. 'It's not mandated, it's not regulatory. Given where we are with the climate crisis, it should be top of the agenda for regulators everywhere.' As a result of this lack of transparency, Luccioni says, the public is being exposed to estimates that make no sense but which are taken as gospel. You may have heard, for instance, that the average ChatGPT request takes 10 times as much energy as the average Google search. Luccioni and her colleagues track down this claim to a public remark that John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, made in 2023. A claim made by a board member from one company (Google) about the product of another company to which he has no relation (OpenAI) is tenuous at best—yet, Luccioni's analysis finds, this figure has been repeated again and again in press and policy reports. (As I was writing this piece, I got a pitch with this exact statistic.) 'People have taken an off-the-cuff remark and turned it into an actual statistic that's informing policy and the way people look at these things,' Luccioni says. 'The real core issue is that we have no numbers. So even the back-of-the-napkin calculations that people can find, they tend to take them as the gold standard, but that's not the case.' One way to try and take a peek behind the curtain for more accurate information is to work with open source models. Some tech giants, including OpenAI and Anthropic, keep their models proprietary—meaning outside researchers can't independently verify their energy use. But other companies make some parts of their models publicly available, allowing researchers to more accurately gauge their emissions. A study published Thursday in the journal Frontiers of Communication evaluated 14 open-source large language models, including two Meta Llama models and three DeepSeek models, and found that some used as much as 50 percent more energy than other models in the dataset responding to prompts from the researchers. The 1,000 benchmark prompts submitted to the LLMs included questions on topics such as high school history and philosophy; half of the questions were formatted as multiple choice, with only one-word answers available, while half were submitted as open prompts, allowing for a freer format and longer answers. Reasoning models, the researchers found, generated far more thinking tokens—measures of internal reasoning generated in the model while producing its answer, which are a hallmark of more energy use—than more concise models. These models, perhaps unsurprisingly, were also more accurate with complex topics. (They also had trouble with brevity: During the multiple choice phase, for instance, the more complex models would often return answers with multiple tokens, despite explicit instructions to only answer from the range of options provided.) Maximilian Dauner, a PhD student at the Munich University of Applied Sciences and the study's lead author, says he hopes AI use will evolve to think about how to more efficiently use less-energy-intensive models for different queries. He envisions a process where smaller, simpler questions are automatically directed to less-energy-intensive models that will still provide accurate answers. 'Even smaller models can achieve really good results on simpler tasks, and don't have that huge amount of CO 2 emitted during the process,' he says. Some tech companies already do this. Google and Microsoft have previously told WIRED that their search features use smaller models when possible, which can also mean faster responses for users. But generally, model providers have done little to nudge users toward using less energy. How quickly a model answers a question, for instance, has a big impact on its energy use—but that's not explained when AI products are presented to users, says Noman Bashir, the Computing & Climate Impact Fellow at MIT's Climate and Sustainability Consortium. 'The goal is to provide all of this inference the quickest way possible so that you don't leave their platform,' he says. 'If ChatGPT suddenly starts giving you a response after five minutes, you will go to some other tool that is giving you an immediate response.' However, there's a myriad of other considerations to take into account when calculating the energy use of complex AI queries, because it's not just theoretical—the conditions under which queries are actually run out in the real world matter. Bashir points out that physical hardware makes a difference when calculating emissions. Dauner ran his experiments on an Nvidia A100 GPU, but Nvidia's H100 GPU—which was specially designed for AI workloads, and which, according to the company, is becoming increasingly popular—is much more energy-intensive. Physical infrastructure also makes a difference when talking about emissions. Large data centers need cooling systems, light, and networking equipment, which all add on more energy; they often run in diurnal cycles, taking a break at night when queries are lower. They are also hooked up to different types of grids—ones overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels, versus those powered by renewables—depending on their locations. Bashir compares studies that look at emissions from AI queries without factoring in data center needs to lifting up a car, hitting the gas, and counting revolutions of a wheel as a way of doing a fuel-efficiency test. 'You're not taking into account the fact that this wheel has to carry the car and the passenger,' he says. Perhaps most crucially for our understanding of AI's emissions, open source models like the ones Dauner used in his study represent a fraction of the AI models used by consumers today. Training a model and updating deployed models takes a massive amount of energy—figures that many big companies keep secret. It's unclear, for example, whether the light bulb statistic about ChatGPT from OpenAI's Altman takes into account all the energy used to train the models powering the chatbot. Without more disclosure, the public is simply missing much of the information needed to start understanding just how much this technology is impacting the planet. 'If I had a magic wand, I would make it mandatory for any company putting an AI system into production, anywhere, around the world, in any application, to disclose carbon numbers,' Luccioni says. Paresh Dave contributed reporting.
Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Exclusive-Trump administration disbands group focused on pressuring Russia, sources say
By Gram Slattery WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump administration shelved in recent weeks an inter-agency working group it had set up to formulate strategies for pressuring Russia into speeding up peace talks with Ukraine, according to three U.S. officials. The effort, which was established earlier in the spring, lost steam in May as it became increasingly clear to participants that U.S. President Donald Trump was not interested in adopting a more confrontational stance toward Moscow, said the officials. Despite pledging during his campaign to end the war in Ukraine on the first day of his presidency, Trump in recent months has grown increasingly frustrated that his push has yielded no breakthroughs. He has begun saying that the United States may abandon its efforts to broker peace altogether. In light of that threat, the working group's task seemed increasingly irrelevant, added those officials, who requested anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions. "It lost steam toward the end because the president wasn't there. Instead of doing more, maybe he wanted to do less," one of the officials said. The death of the working group, the existence of which has not been previously reported, is likely to deepen European allies' concerns over Trump's at-times conciliatory tone toward Russia and his reluctance to express full-throated support for Ukraine ahead of a pivotal summit of NATO allies later this month. On the first day of a meeting of Group of Seven leaders in Canada on Monday, the Republican president said removing Russia from the former Group of Eight over a decade ago had been a mistake. The final blow for the working group came roughly three weeks ago, when most members of the White House National Security Council - including the entire team dealing directly with the Ukraine war - were dismissed as part of a broad purge, according to the three officials. The effort was set up and coordinated by high-ranking NSC staffers, the officials said, though it included participants from the State Department, Treasury Department, the Pentagon and intelligence community. Among those working on the effort was Andrew Peek, the top NSC official for Europe and Russia, who was removed in May. It is unclear precisely who gave the order to discontinue the effort, but the officials suggested the depth of the NSC cuts made its continuation largely untenable. Since the effort's dissolution, Trump's broader peacemaking efforts, which had been a central element of his campaign pitch, have hit a challenging stretch. Despite some successes - such as a U.S.-brokered ceasefire between India and Pakistan - Trump has made little tangible progress in achieving a ceasefire in Gaza and the risk of a full-blown regional war in the Middle East has risen rapidly with the Israel-Iran conflict. The dissolution of the group also follows a March suspension of work by some U.S. national security agencies on a coordinated effort to counter Russian sabotage and disinformation operations, Reuters reported at the time. Nevertheless, Trump could choose to adopt a firmer stance toward Russia regardless of the fate of the working group, which was set up to develop options for the president "if he wanted to get tougher on Russia," one of the officials said. Some Trump allies, including Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, have publicly advocated for an expansive new round of sanctions directed at Russia, citing Moscow's effective rejection of U.S. ceasefire proposals and the Kremlin's continual attacks on civilian targets as proof of Putin's recalcitrance. Trump has said he is considering such measures, but he has also regularly faulted both sides for the ongoing hostilities. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the Treasury Department, the State Department or the Pentagon. The Ukrainian and Russian embassies in Washington also did not respond to requests for comment. "DEEP FRUSTRATION" The working group was formed in March or April at a time when some close Trump advisers were growing increasingly skeptical of the Kremlin's willingness to reach a deal, while Trump's rhetoric suggested he might be interested in modifying his accommodating stance toward Putin. In an interview with NBC News in late March, he said he was "very angry" and "pissed off" at the Russian leader for raising questions about the legitimacy of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. NSC spokesman James Hewitt said in an April 1 statement to Reuters that there was a "deep frustration with the Russian government over negotiations." Among the topics discussed within the working group was how the U.S. could incentivize or pressure former Soviet states, as well as other Eastern European and Asian nations, to limit the flow of goods and energy into and out of Russia, said the officials. It is unclear if Trump was aware of the working group's formation or subsequent dissolution. The NSC removals left few high-ranking people on the Russia file, complicating the prospects for any robust inter-agency debate on the topic. While reluctant to discuss the details of the options drawn up by the group due to the sensitive nature of the work, U.S. officials said the group was still brainstorming ideas when it was dissolved. The group's work was unrelated to the Russia sanctions package in the U.S. Senate. Ideas ranged from tailored economic deals designed to peel some countries out of Russia's geopolitical orbit to covert special operations efforts, the officials said. One official mentioned the possibility of creating an incentive structure to push Kazakhstan to more vigorously crack down on sanctions evasion. The country, like other post-Soviet states, has been used by traders to bypass some Western-imposed import restrictions on Russia since Moscow's expanded invasion began in 2022. The Kazakhstani embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
