UK To Invest 900 Million Pounds In Supercomputer In Bid To Build Own 'BritGPT' (theguardian.com) 35
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The UK government is to invest 900 million pounds in a cutting-edge supercomputer as part of an artificial intelligence strategy that includes ensuring the country can build its own "BritGPT". The treasury outlined plans to spend around 900 million pounds on building an exascale computer, which would be several times more powerful than the UK's biggest computers, and establishing a new AI research body. An exascale computer can be used for training complex AI models, but also have other uses across science, industry and defense, including modeling weather forecasts and climate projections. The Treasury said the investment will "allow researchers to better understand climate change, power the discovery of new drugs and maximize our potential in AI.".
An exascale computer is one that can carry out more than one billion billion simple calculations a second, a metric known as an "exaflops". Only one such machine is known to exist, Frontier, which is housed at America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and used for scientific research -- although supercomputers have such important military applications that it may be the case that others already exist but are not acknowledged by their owners. Frontier, which cost about 500 million pounds to produce and came online in 2022, is more than twice as powerful as the next fastest machine.
The Treasury said it would award a 1 million-pound prize every year for the next 10 years to the most groundbreaking AI research. The award will be called the Manchester Prize, in memory of the so-called Manchester Baby, a forerunner of the modern computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. The government will also invest 2.5 billion pounds over the next decade in quantum technologies. Quantum computing is based on quantum physics -- which looks at how the subatomic particles that make up the universe work -- and quantum computers are capable of computing their way through vast numbers of different outcomes.
An exascale computer is one that can carry out more than one billion billion simple calculations a second, a metric known as an "exaflops". Only one such machine is known to exist, Frontier, which is housed at America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and used for scientific research -- although supercomputers have such important military applications that it may be the case that others already exist but are not acknowledged by their owners. Frontier, which cost about 500 million pounds to produce and came online in 2022, is more than twice as powerful as the next fastest machine.
The Treasury said it would award a 1 million-pound prize every year for the next 10 years to the most groundbreaking AI research. The award will be called the Manchester Prize, in memory of the so-called Manchester Baby, a forerunner of the modern computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. The government will also invest 2.5 billion pounds over the next decade in quantum technologies. Quantum computing is based on quantum physics -- which looks at how the subatomic particles that make up the universe work -- and quantum computers are capable of computing their way through vast numbers of different outcomes.
Great Plan (Score:2)
How Much To Make It Talk Funny? (Score:2)
An extra 100 million pounds?
quantum supervapor (Score:1)
no, quantum computers don't do anything fast nor complex.
Re: (Score:2)
Where we stand today, we are gaining massive amount of useful and real data from the research into quantum... well anything. I think the most interesting topic I've encountered so far was that we managed to implement a honest to goodness perpetual motion machine which could never have been possible outside of a quantum computer. You'll have to look it up to better understand it. It's not a profit
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Hahaha NO.
Transistorized computers appeared ten years after invention of transistor. Meanwhile, quantum computers around for decades before they could even factor 15. Right now, 143 is the biggest. Pathetic.
No, quantum annealers aren't QC and don't count
two weeks early (Score:3)
uhh, guys?
April Fools day isn't for two weeks yet.
Furthermore, this is one of the weakest hoaxes for it in a long time.
Call it (Score:4, Funny)
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Call it Holly, and give it a Brummie accent.
DIY (Score:2)
Buy a few Supermicro SYS-821GEs. In each, throw in a couple of 56 core Xeon CPUs, a few TB of DDR5 RAM, and 8 nVidia H100 GPUs, and a dozen or so Samsung 8TB SSDs. Wire them together with 100GbE ethernet. Install Ubuntu on them.
Then clone this and run it:
https://huggingface.co/Eleuthe... [huggingface.co]
There you have your own ChatGPT running on very respectable hardware for a couple of million USD.
There I saved you hundreds of millions of pounds. Can I have some of them?
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Or better still just grab Meta's llama and stanfords Alpaca tuning and you've got something that will handily compete with GPT3. And just keep training the damn thing.
Starting to look pathetic (Score:5, Informative)
One day I'm hopeful the new "global Britain" will actually come up with a relevant idea of its own instead of pledging to through money after buzzwords generated by the success of other countries.
While I'm excited about the prospect of playing with ChatGPT that speaks in the Queen's English, I'm sure the people waiting 45minute for ambulances only to be stuck in triage for hours due to NHS underfunding don't feel the same way.
The pledge feels hollow. The only thing I'm really excited about is playing the guessing game as to just how they will fuck this up.
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While I'm excited about the prospect of playing with ChatGPT that speaks in the Queen's English
...Anyone else wanna tell him?
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While I'm excited about the prospect of playing with ChatGPT that speaks in the Queen's English
...Anyone else wanna tell him?
Wrong type of Queen. The OP was referring to a chatbot that'll tell you "I say ducky, did you catch the number she was wearing? Don't look now girls, you'll just get her upset and she'll scratch your eyes out".
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...Anyone else wanna tell him?
No need to tell me anything. #notmyking.
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The only thing I'm really excited about is playing the guessing game as to just how they will fuck this up.
Well that's the thing, isn't it. The one thing, possibly the only thing that the Tories understand and are good at is bungs to their cronies.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Global Britain just means free money for friends of the Tory Party, and using the UK as a tax haven. If you are an oligarch, if your wealth was ill-gotten, the UK is the place to stash it. Maybe you'd like to buy some London property?
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Yeah, like Graphene.
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Like what? Are you trying to imply that Graphene was the result of the UK government throwing money at something in a #metoo moment, rather than a co-funded investment from an EU institution into something that was developed first in the UK and without government funding? And before Brexit and the "global Britain" bullshit?
Your example is off topic in every single facet of the point I was making.
Re: (Score:2)
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pledging to through money after buzzwords... ...ChatGPT that speaks in the Queen's English
One of these things is not like the other.
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King's English. I know Prince Charles coronation hasn't officially happened yet, but he is technically king-in-waiting and thus will be King's English.
I suspect this is going to be the biggest annoyance in dealing with King Charles - we're so used to dealing with the Queen that we're just used to it. Changing everything will not be fun.
A number of places in Canada make reference to the Queen, for example, and more
Re: (Score:1)
King's English.
#notmymonarchy. Actually not even joking. For many people the monarchy died with the Queen. Largely no one gives a shit about King Charles.
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Okay I take it back. One slashdotter with a mod point gives a shit about King Charles. XD
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Let's hope BritGP has more manners than a turd. Unlike you.
When British people say that Americans don't understand irony, I can show them your comment.
Thanks.
It is really not about computing power (Score:4, Insightful)
This is just some more moron politicians trying to build themselves a monument.
Re: (Score:3)
£600m for climate change
£900m to build a computer someone else already built.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, still suicidal (long-term) priorities.
Sure, AI's just a faster computer (Score:2)
These Brits know what they're doing. All you need is a "supercomputer" and then you can have AI. Forget the software. Of course, now other countries will know that all they need to do is buy a "supercomputer" and then they can have their own AI. So, lots of countries are going to realize that you don't have to educate their populations and create environments that foster innovation. All you need to do is buy a "supercomputer." Well done you.