LONDON — The U.K is seeking to build a homegrown competitor to OpenAI and dramatically boost the national computing infrastructure as Prime Minister Keir Starmer's administration reaches for the status of global frontrunner in artificial intelligence.
Starmer will make the commitment in Bristol, England, on Monday, following work by British tech investor Matt Clifford to develop an "AI Opportunities Action Plan" to help the U.K. make the most of the potential of AI.
In fact, most of the desire for data center capacity is across the U.K., with a view to developing developers of powerful AI models that require high-performance computing equipment housed in remote locations to train and run their systems.
It thus aims to increase "sovereign," or public sector, compute capacity in the U.K. twentyfold by 2030. The first step in making good on that pledge is to start opening access to the AI Research Resource, a plan to give computing infrastructure a shot in the arm in the U.K.
Her Starmer's administration last year axed £1.3 billion of taxpayer-funded spending commitments towards two big computing projects in order to instead prioritize other fiscal plans. These projects, which will include an AI Research Resource and a next-generation "exascale" supercomputer, were pledges under his predecessor Rishi Sunak.
Sovereign AI has been the hot word for policymakers, at least in Europe. It describes the fact that technologies important for economic growth and national security should be built and developed in the country where people are adopting them.
To further bolster the country's computing infrastructure, it also pledged the creation of a number of AI "growth zones," in which rules around planning permission will be relaxed in certain places to create new data centers.
Meanwhile, it set up an "AI Energy Council" comprising industry leaders across both energy and AI, which will investigate the role that renewable and low-carbon sources of energy could play, like nuclear.
It comes as technology giants like
- Amazon
- Microsoft
are ploughing hundreds of millions of dollars into small modular reactors (SMR) providing nuclear energy powering the data centres behind their respective AI systems.
Building a rival to OpenAI
The last major initiative the U.K. government proposed was to create homegrown AI “champions” of a similar scale to American tech giants responsible for the foundational AI models that power today’s generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
It will make use of the AI growth zones, as well as a new National Data Library to link up public institutions, such as universities, in a bid to increase the UK's capability to develop "sovereign" AI models-such as those independent of Silicon Valley.
Worth noting is that the U.K. is facing some stern challenges in the quest to ensure an Open AI workable replacement. First and foremost, different entrepreneurs have grumbled over some funding challenges making it difficult for startups within the country to raise this kind of cash available for AI success stories.
Meanwhile, many U.K. founders and venture capitalists argue that the nation should be forcing pension funds to set aside a better % of its portfolios toward far riskier startups-focused upon growth-a reform the government in the past says it will insist on.
In the U.K. alone, there's $7 trillion in this pocket," Magnus Grimeland, CEO and founder of venture capital firm Antler, told CNBC in an interview last year. "Imagine if you take just 5% of that and allocate it to innovation-you solve the problem.
U.K. tech leaders have nevertheless generally praised the government's AI action plan. Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce's U.K. boss, told CNBC the plan is a "forward-thinking strategy," adding she's encouraged by the government's "bold vision for AI and emphasis on transparency, safety and collaboration.
Chintan Patel, Cisco's chief technology officer in the U.K., said he's "encouraged" by the action plan. "Having a clearly defined roadmap is critical for the UK to achieve its ambition to become an AI superpower and a leading destination for AI investment," he said.
Britain doesn't yet have formal regulations for AI. Starmer's government has previously said it plans to draw up legislation for AI but details remain thin.
Last month, the Government announced a consultation on plans to regulate the use of copyright material in training AI models.
More generally, the U.K. is pitching a differentiated regulatory regime from the EU following Brexit as a positive factor — meaning, it can introduce regulatory oversight for AI but in a way that’s less strict than the EU, which has taken a more hard-line approach to regulating the technology with its AI Act.
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