British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is being interviewed by the media after attending the 79th United Nations General Assembly held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, USA, on September 25, 2024.
Leon Neal | via Reuters
LONDON — Britain is seeking to build a domestic challenger to OpenAI and significantly increase the country’s computing infrastructure as Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government aims to become a global leader in artificial intelligence.
Starmer will visit Bristol, England on Monday to announce the pledge, which follows work done by British tech investor Matt Clifford to create an “AI Opportunity Action Plan”. The initiative aims to help the UK harness the potential of AI.
The government is seeking to expand data center capacity across the UK to support developers of powerful AI models, who train and run their systems primarily using high-performance computing equipment hosted in remote locations.
A target has been set to increase the UK’s “sovereign”, or public sector, computing capacity by 20-fold by 2030. As part of that pledge, the government will begin opening up access to AI research resources, an initiative aimed at strengthening the UK’s computing infrastructure.
The Starmer administration canceled £1.3 billion of taxpayer-backed spending commitments on two key computing initiatives last year to prioritize other financial plans. The project, which includes AI research resources and a next-generation “exascale” supercomputer, had been promised by Starmer’s predecessor, Rishi Sunak.
Sovereign AI has become a hot topic for policymakers, especially in Europe. The term refers to the idea that technologies critical to economic growth and national security should be built and developed in countries where people adopt them.
To further boost the UK’s computing infrastructure, the government has pledged to set up a number of AI “growth zones”, which will relax rules on planning permission in certain places to allow the establishment of new data centres.
Meanwhile, the ‘AI Energy Council’, comprised of industry leaders in the energy and AI fields, will be formed to explore the role of renewable energy such as nuclear energy and low-carbon energy sources.
Building a Challenger to OpenAI
The last major plan proposed by the UK government was to create domestic AI “champions”. no way It’s similar in size to the US tech giants responsible for the underlying AI models that power today’s generative AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The UK plans to use AI growth zones and the newly established National Data Library to connect public institutions such as universities to improve the country’s ability to create “sovereign” AI models that are not dependent on Silicon Valley.
It is worth emphasizing that the UK faces serious challenges in its efforts to create an effective OpenAI alternative. First of all, several entrepreneurs in the country have lamented the funding challenges that make it difficult for local startups to raise cash that can be used for AI success stories.
Many British startups and venture capitalists have been calling for the state pension fund to allocate a larger portion of its portfolio to riskier, growth-focused startups. These are reforms the government has previously committed to pursuing.
“The UK has $7 trillion in these pockets,” Magnus Grimeland, CEO and founder of venture capital firm Antler, told CNBC last year. “Imagine if we took just 5% of that and allocated it to innovation, the problem would be solved.”
Despite this, UK tech leaders generally praised the government’s AI action plan. Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce’s UK president, told CNBC the plan was a “forward-thinking strategy”, adding that she was encouraged by the government’s “bold vision for AI and emphasis on transparency, safety and collaboration.”
Chintan Patel, Cisco’s UK chief technology officer, said he was “committed” to the plan. “If the UK is to achieve its ambitions to become an AI superpower and a leading destination for AI investment, it is vital that we have a clearly defined roadmap,” he said.
The UK does not yet have formal regulations for AI. The Starmer government has previously said it plans to bring in legislation on AI, but details remain sparse.
Last month, the government announced a consultation on ways to regulate the use of copyrighted content for training AI models.
More generally, the UK’s differentiated regulatory regime from the EU post-Brexit presents itself as a positive factor. That means it could introduce regulatory oversight of AI, but in a less stringent way than the EU, which has taken a harder-line approach. Regulating technology through AI law.
